


Strange Lore, Where the Meadow Grasses Hang Hoar

by moontyrant



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Pirate, BAMF Clint Barton, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Fae & Fairies, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mermaid Thor, Minor Character Death, Natasha Needs a Hug, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Protective Steve Rogers, Sky Pirates, Steve Rogers Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Daddy Issues, accidental BrucexNat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-17 04:17:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4651959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moontyrant/pseuds/moontyrant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Captain Rogers has not set foot on a sea faring vessel larger than a fishing boat in five years, but that all changes when he is given a mission he simply cannot refuse: retrieving the Tesseract from Loki's clutches. Little does he know that doing so means coming face to face with the ghost that haunts his nightmares.</p><p>The Goblin King sends the Winter Marauder to steal the Tesseract so that the king might reign supreme over all the fae. Armed to the teeth with the Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver at his side, there is no way the Winter Marauder can fail. As long as no one breaks the geas holding him to the king's rule.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Start Me All Over Again

**Author's Note:**

> Fic based on this [post.](http://dippy-ecks.tumblr.com/post/126620366406/ive-been-pretty-bored-lately-so-i-started)
> 
> Title for this fic comes from ["On a Night of Snow"](http://allpoetry.com/On-A-Night-of-Snow) by Elizabeth Coatsworth.
> 
> Title for this chapter comes from ["Erase All Memory"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgZBv1XuN9c) by 32 Leaves.

Once upon a time there was a crew of God-fearing privateers. They sailed under their own colors: a white star on a field of blue, ringed with bars of white and crimson. Painted in bold red across the port side were the words _The Howling Commando_ , and the members of her crew were called the same. Their lady patron adorned the side in hues faded by the surf: a dark-haired woman with daring red lips and hard eyes, dressed in crisp greens and browns, perched with her knees tight together, hands folded in her lap. How strange to see a prim and proper lady painted on such a rough vessel, when all about her scantily clad pinups dance and pose and laugh on their ships. The lady patron of the Howling Commando sits, a vision of patience, and she waits.

The Howling Commandos themselves were known throughout the seas. Tenacious, the bards called them. Vicious. Righteous. But all the tales paled in comparison to the rumors that followed their intrepid captain.

They said he was born to be a king in a distant realm, pulled a sword from a stone, but believed himself unworthy. They said he travelled with a horde of thieves before stealing away to the sea. They said he was born sickly and small, but he made a pilgrimage to the High Temple and his prayers for strength and health were answered on the wings of a dove. They said he has the strength of ten men and the courage of twenty. They say he can bring peace to our land within our time.

This is not his story.

 

 

The chatter and clatter of the smoky bar came to a ringing halt when she walked in. Through the blue haze of tobacco smoke the patrons watched her, the way her red hair fell in precise lines about her shoulders, the confidence in the sway of her hips as her boots crunched across discarded peanut shells and sawdust, the flat black of her jacket and snug fit of her slacks. She strode up to the bar, never minding the open-mouthed stares of the drunken men. She ordered a vodka, neat, top shelf, please. The bartender almost asked her if she was lost, but he decided against it. In his experience, women who didn’t know their own minds didn’t make it this close to the docks at this time of night.

She tossed back her vodka in two bird-quick gulps, and placed the tumbler back on the sticky bar with a slam and turned on her heel. “Excuse me,” she purred, sidling up to Ugly Fatso. His name wasn’t actually Ugly Fatso, but it was an accurate description and he didn’t much mind, so it stuck. She rested a hand on his elbow. “I’m looking for a man.”

Ugly Fatso looked around at the other barflies, all watching him in stunned silence. “Ma’am, I think you come to the wrong place,” he told her, and was trying to think of a gentle way to shoo her through the door without embarrassing her or making a spectacle of himself. This was no place for a lady.

Her hand tightened on his sleeve. “I’m looking for a Captain Rogers. Have you heard of him?”

He frowned. “Could be. Could be. Who’s asking?”

She jangled a drawstring purse at her hip. “I can make it worth your while, sailor.” It was a nice purse, one of those black leather jobs favored by assassins and rich codgers who wished they were assassins. Ugly Fatso tried not to think about that too hard.

“Miss, with all due respect I’m not one to out a fellow drunken bastard. If this is a marital dispute-“

“Nothing of the sort, I assure you.” There was steel in her voice. She had a very expensive purse. “I have a job that needs doing, and I want Captain Rogers. Specifically.”

Ugly Fatso wet his lips. “I don’t think he’s that kind of man.”

“We’ll see.”

He mulled that over for a moment. “Go to the back room. There’s a poker game going on. Probably. And he’ll be playing to win.”

She dropped the purse on the table in front of him. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

All eyes in the room fell on the purse and the spill of yellow coins around it and Ugly Fatso might be ugly and fat, but he wasn’t an idiot. “Drinks on me!” he cried, and the chatter in the tavern resumed with interest as he bought a round for everyone he could. It didn’t do to walk around with so much gold on your person. Not in this neighborhood at this time of night. But he would keep the purse itself for a rainy day.

The woman did not walk so much as prowl to the back room, through a curtain of beads and down a few steps where a poker game was indeed happening. Five players total with her query sitting on the far side of the table, back to the wall and facing to the room’s entrance. He did a double take.

The first thing she noticed was his beard. It was a coppery gold color, thick and unruly; he looked like he had a dead animal plastered to his face. Then he got to his feet, as a gentleman does when a lady enters a room, and she noticed his build. He was tall with broad shoulders and a thickness to his arms and middle she might have discounted as clothing layers or a healthy appetite if she didn’t know better. And then she noticed his eyes: big and impossibly blue and creased with enough worry for a lifetime. “Miss, are you lost?” he asked. The other players twisted in their seats to gawk at her but didn’t get up.

“I am exactly where I intend to be, Captain.”

He stopped short, a crease appearing between his eyebrows. “It’s been a long time since I’ve captained anything bigger than a fishing boat, ma’am.”

She quirked a smile and held out her elbow. “Walk with me.”

 

“Is it really so dangerous in the No-Tale Hotel?” she mused.

He watched her from the corner of his eye as they walked along the block, the smell of summer garbage muted by the briny wind and the cool night. “No, ma’am,” he sighed. “It’s safe as houses. Just not a place for dames.”

“And why is that?” she challenged. “Does the thought of women drinking provoke you?”

“Not especially.” He tried to think of a delicate way to say it but came up dry, so he plunged on. “The No-Tale Hotel caters to a specific kind of man.”

“Oh?”

“The kind of man who doesn’t seek the company of women in his free time, if you catch my meaning.”

She frowned. “Homosexuals.”

“Yes.”

“What, all of them?”

“ _Yes._ And there’s a sister tavern literally two streets over. Everyone thought you got lost on your way there.”

“There’s a gay sister tavern in the _red light district_?”

“It’s very nice,” he told her with big, innocent eyes. “Miss Tiffany hires me on as a bouncer on rowdy nights.”

She rolled her eyes. “Moving on. I’m here to call you in. The Colonel has a mission that needs Captain Rogers at the fore.”

“I’m not interested.”

She stopped short and he turned to gauge her reaction, bracing himself for the worst. “May I ask why?”

Why? A hundred reasons at least, and six jumped readily to mind but he couldn’t just _say_ it, not to a complete stranger. He fixed her with his blandest smile. “I’m not cut out for that life anymore.”

“I see,” she said even though she looked skeptical as hell. She took a slim manila folder from the inside of her jacket and handed it to him. Someone had stamped classified in thick red letters across its front. “This is some light reading for you; it’s only fair you get to know about the mission you’re turning down. The short version basically boils down to this: while you live your life drinking rum and playing poker in a gay tavern, good people are going to put their lives on the line to protect the world from eldritch forces they barely understand. But, you know, you do you.” She turned on her heel and walked away.

He frowned at the folder in his hands, crisp enough that he knew it could not have been handled by very many people before tonight. “Do you have a name?” he asked before she could disappear from the pool of yellow streetlamp light.

She paused and said over her shoulder “I’ve gone by many names, Captain, but in this life you can call me Natasha. If you have need of me, in professional circles they call me the Black Widow. Have a good night.”

 

The Avenger was a damn fine ship. Her Ladyship commissioned it two years after The Howling Commando sank and her Ladyship’s pet alchemist/engineer was very proud of it, even if Colonel Fury never let him get within 500 feet of the finished product. “Dad was working on the prototype for the air balloons but he never got a boat of this magnitude in the air,” Tony Stark said. He gesticulated wildly and his big brown eyes twinkled as he waxed poetic about the compromises between hydro and aero dynamics and the ideal cross between a sloop and an airship, and Doctor Bruce Banner could only stare because Tony Stark was a child.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” Bruce grunted at all the appropriate intervals. He worried his spectacles between his fingers. Originally he set this time aside to psych himself up for the mission ahead. He had the whole morning planned out: Grapple with his daily existential crisis over breakfast, sink into bottomless despair for about 30 minutes or so, yoga, brace himself for some kind of betrayal or elaborate double-cross on Fury’s part, spend the carriage ride to the Avenger dreading the entire mission and the possibility of horrible failure, and scope out escape routes in case of the Other Guy or people.

Mostly people.

And then Tony happened. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh,” Bruce grunted, nodding absent-mindedly. He never had the opportunity to use the term “stoked” before, but this kid fit the bill, practically crackling with nervous energy and aglow with his own genius. “But you’re not coming,” Bruce cut in.

Tony deflated somewhat. “Well, no. Fury wouldn’t allow it. He thinks I’m too young or something.”

“How old are you?”

“One and twenty,” he answered, just this side of too eager.

Bruce watched his face. “I put you at sixteen, eighteen at the outside.”

“I’m an adult!” Tony whined. He stamped his feet for good measure, definitely driving the point home that he was a mature adult.

“Uh-huh.”

“Ye gods! You’re worse than the colonel!”

“Speak of the devil,” Bruce murmured and Tony whirled to come face to face with the man himself.

Colonel Nicholas Fury struck an imposing figure: black trench coat, black tunic, black breeches, sun-darkened skin and face as wind-chapped as it was scarred, a black cloth wrapped over half of his face to hide his bad eye but not his merciless scowl. He wore a cutlass at his hip and a pistol secured in a shoulder holster and rumor had it he never went anywhere without at least five knives on his person at all times. “Stark!” he barked. “What the hell do you think you’re doing on my dock?”

“Okay, technically it’s not your dock, it’s a public dock.” Tony grinned up into the epitome of unimpressed. Adults had been making that face at him his entire life; he built up quite the immunity.

“Get off my public dock. Don’t you have a governess looking for you?”

“Oh ha, ha. Never heard that one before,” Tony sneered. He pushed his hands in his pockets and slouched away, nearly knocking into an imposing red-haired woman and then nearly tripping over a coil of rope when he overcorrected. The woman carefully did not smile.

“Dr. Banner, this is Agent Romanoff,” Fury introduced.

Bruce gave her a nervous smile. “Well met.”

“Call me Natasha. Only spies and pirates call me Romanoff.”

“Yes, you’re hilarious,” Fury growled. “I can see you two are going to get on like a house on fire. That’s an idiom, Romanoff, not an invitation.”

She pouted. “You have no sense of fun, Nick.”

“I’m very fun. I’m going to go be fun on my boat, and I invite you both to get on it so we can get this damn show on the road.”

“We need to wait for the Captain.”

Bruce frowned at Fury, who shrugged. “I’ll be doing most of the captaining of my baby, but I like to have a second pair of hands to take over, and someone to take point on ops.” He turned to Natasha, his one visible eyebrow raised. “Are you sure he’ll show?”

“I know he will,” she promised.

Fury nodded. “Get on the boat. I’ll wait here for him, but if he’s not here in time for the tide we’re leaving his star-spangled ass here.”

“Understood.” She grinned at Bruce. Her teeth were very white and straight and sharp. “You’re gonna love it, Doc. We got all the toys.”

He followed her up the gangplank and onto the ship, and he tried to blame the sudden wave of nausea on the gentle rocking underfoot and not the fact that in an hour it will be surrounded by open sea. “Never been on the ocean before,” he admitted. “Grew up inland.”

“Happy childhood?”

“No.” They walked across the broad, flat deck and she led him into the common cabin filled with sunlight and scientific equipment—his workspace for the foreseeable future.

“Oh good. Can’t stand people with happy childhoods. It’s impossible to find common ground with them.” She picked up an astrolabe and put it down again.

“For some more than most.” He watched her pick up an inkwell and put it back in its spot again. “How long…” the words died in his throat, but too late. She looked up at him and waited. He pinched his ear. “You have surgical scars. I didn’t mean to pry.”

She grinned again. It wasn’t a nice grin, tightlipped and cold and very sharp. She reached up and twisted her own ears, running her thumbs over the faded scarring, imperceptible to someone who didn’t know where to look. “What gave me away?”

“I, uh, I’ve worked by the woodlands so I see cases…often. You move like a dancer, or a predator, and you…touch things like you want to steal them. Not, not like you want them, but like you want to take something and walk away. It’s not my business; forget I said anything.”

She watched him. “I’ve been rehabilitated. It’s not a big deal. I’m mostly human.”

His lips twitched and he had to look away. “That makes one of us.”

She strode back to the entrance and flung open the door. “Let’s get some air,” and she led him back onto the deck in time to see a Fury lead a man onboard. “Ah, he shaved.”

The man was indeed clean-shaven, with yellow hair cropped short and fair complexion dotted by freckles and about as wind chapped as the colonel’s. He bore no luggage, bringing aboard only himself and the clothes on his back: crisp white shirt, vivid blue frock coat with crimson lapels and trimming, tan knee breeches, floppy ruddy leather boots and matching fingerless gloves preferred by sailors everywhere, an air of aimless dread matched only by Bruce’s own.

“Doctor Banner, meet Captain Steve Rogers. Captain, this is Bruce Banner,” Natasha said with a flourish of her hands.

Rogers bobbed his head at Bruce. “I’ve heard about your work in gamma radiation research.”

Bruce nodded numbly at the last of the Howling Commandos. The legends following Steve Rogers were many and graphic; none of them said he slouched as if to make himself look smaller. “Is that the only word you’ve heard about me?”

“It’s the only word I care about.” And then the deckhands were raising anchor and the Avenger drifted from its dock, away from the city, away from the harbor, and out to sea. Fury wandered to the control room and the doctor, the spy and the captain watched the land recede. The deck hummed and groaned.

The lull broke when Natasha sighed and rolled her shoulders. “Gentlemen, we should head inside. It’s going to get hard to breathe.”

Rogers raised an eyebrow. “Is this a submarine?”

Bruce eyed the shuddering sails and the deckhands pulling the fine nylon material of the balloons into place so they could be inflated. “Oh no. It’s much, much worse.”

 

They lunched in the control room at a big round table in bucket chairs while Fury and his trusted lieutenant Maria Hill prowled in the background. Everyone present was familiar with the mission objective: a rogue individual took an artefact of great power, the Tesseract, from Fury’s custody and made off with it and about a dozen agents. They needed to retrieve the Tesseract, free the agents from whatever made them turn, and extradite the rogue individual back to his home.

“His home in Asgard?” Bruce clarified.

“Yes,” Fury growled.

“That’s just great. So we’re working against a demigod. Fantastic.” Bruce couldn’t say he was an expert at this sort of thing, but he was about 80% sure the crew of the Avenger was not prepared for any kind of throw down involving a demigod. What bothered him was how Fury didn’t seem to realize it was a problem. That coupled with the way Rogers was watching him (like a ticking time bomb, like he could somehow intervene if the Other Guy came out to play) had him on edge. The combination made him want to peel his skin off.

“Doctor, we just need you to track the Tesseract. We’ll tackle this mission one step at a time.”

Bruce smoothed his palms over his trousers. “Then let’s get started.”

 

 

 

The Winter Marauder knelt in the snow, not-remembering. There is a fine line between not remembering and not-remembering; people go their whole lives not remembering, but the Winter Marauder felt he was being rather proactive about it. So he knelt in snow that never fell and went about not-remembering, staring out over a plain where the wind never stirred and the sky never changed. The sky above him was pale gray, almost white, and the landscape sprawled undisturbed in every direction, the line between sky and land lost on the horizon. For as long as he could remember there was only the endless winter. The Winter Marauder let the cold and the quiet sink into him.

That was another thing he was not-remembering right, something slightly off he didn’t want to think about too hard. The cold never made his hands go numb, never made his feet tingle or teeth chatter. Instead the cold settled in his chest, like it bypassed his skin entirely and settled in his soul, iced him from the inside out and made it impossible to think, impossible to feel. Impossible to remember.

What did he forget?

A shape detached from the white-gray sky on whispering wings and spiraled down to him. He held up his metal hand and let it land on his palm with a click of sharp nails. “Labari,” he greeted her. The bird, a parrot he supposed, was primarily a violent purple color with a long white tail and white feet and white beak. Beady red eyes watched him, unreadable, before it deigned to speak.

“You are wanted, Winter.”

The Winter Marauder got to his feet, his hand steady to keep from unseating Labari. “And the Goblin King waits for no man,” he sighed. Between one step and the next he was standing on the palace footsteps. That was another thing he was not-remembering; travel in this part of the world was instantaneous. If he were of a fanciful nature, he might say that it was because all the world were folded in on itself, that all of existence, everything that ever was and ever could be, existed in the space between breaths, right here and right now. Perhaps things like yesterday and yonder were mere fabrications of his numb mind and travel between one and the next was just him adjusting his imagination to accommodate his body. Perhaps, if he wished it, he could move to tomorrow, walk to yesterday like he might from one room to the next. But the Winter Marauder did not wish it, and he did not think about the circumstances of his existence, and he certainly didn’t try to remember the day before or predict the days ahead. For as long as he could remember there was only the endless winter.

The palace of the Goblin King looked much like other fairy castles, though the Winter Marauder had never seen another fairy castle in his life. The roof was shingled in rich purple hues, the walls and steps and floors fashioned from bone, almost yellow against the gleaming white landscape. The troll guards stepped smartly aside to allow him passage and the Marauder passed through the entrance, through the Great Hall and down the spiral footsteps. Brownie servants curtsied or bowed when he passed them, and he paid them no mind. The last time he got too close to a servant of the king, she disappeared, sent on a suicide mission on the other side of the world, too far even for him to travel. He kept his eyes down and feet moving and worked hard to not-remember.

He found the Goblin King in his library, contemplating wine that smelled of copper and oak casks. From one day to the next he never looked the same: today he wore white breeches and a rich brown doublet over a white silk shirt, but tomorrow he may wear all purple and bells on his shoes. The Winter Marauder never saw his face, or if he did he never remembered it. He looked into the Goblin King’s cold, purple eyes and didn’t take in his features at all. The details slipped from his mind as soon as he tried to recall them, like water droplets down a pane of oiled glass, like carefully placed footfalls across a steep, icy slope.

He smiled his serpentine smile, making his eyes crease with something too deadly to be glee. “I have a mission for you,” he sang. “You will bring me the Tesseract and I will solidify my hold on this plane. It’s very exciting. Aren’t you excited?”

“Thrilled.”

The Goblin King hummed. “You’ll be taking the twins, of course.”

“Sir?”

“This is an important mission. I’m sure a little witchly intervention wouldn’t go amiss. And take Labari—she hasn’t wet her beak with blood in quite some time.”

“Yes sir.”

“Go, my little toy soldier,” the king grinned. “You have shaped this century under my direction. Perhaps, if all goes well, I will give you your name back.”

He nodded woodenly, but he knew it was a lie. The Goblin King was as mercurial as any fairy, but it would be a warm day indeed before he gave away the ace up his sleeve. The Marauder placed Labari on his shoulder and marched back the way he came. A shift in imagination brought him to the staircase without meeting any servants along the way and he took the rough bone steps two at a time, up and up and up to the highest solar in the highest tower.

Technically speaking, they were both witches, but he knew enough to only call the girl Witch. The boy he called Quicksilver, and the two of them followed him docilely enough. Labari watched them with narrowed eyes. “Humans,” she sniffed.

The Winter Marauder shrugged, making the bird shuffle her feathers to keep balance. They took the stairs at an almost leisurely pace, the twins’ footsteps over-loud in the hushed stairwell. He suspected he was human once; foundlings and changelings were rare but treasured commodities in the fairy realm—they were strong, quick to learn and unlearn, survivalists by tradition if not by temperament. Most importantly, the sweetest, gentlest, kindest human children made for the cruelest, most vengeful, most devious fairies whether they were warped into orcs, magicked into elves or twisted into goblins. The twins had the Look about them, goblins in the making with sunken eyes and teeth filed to points, their ears already too long and angular to pass for human. Not pointed yet, but soon. They were still young.

The three of them and Labari on his shoulder stepped out into the frozen landscape. He took Witch’s hand and Quicksilver took her other, and between one step and the next red light carried them into a world of noise and color and horror.

Reality is a terrible thing to happen to fairy folk.


	2. Time Flies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint Barton’s day started out weird and just kept going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joke I heard once: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.

Wind. The surf hit his tongue, brine and storms and foam and the promise of…

And promise.

Endless sky, so incredibly blue it made his eyeballs ache in their sockets, like when you first bite into a green apple and its meat is so sweet and sour and real it makes your whole mouth cramp. He drank in the incredible blueness of it, broken only by the fluffiest, whitest clouds he had ever seen. Wind pulled at his hair, his waist coat, his breeches, cool and crisp and heavy with the micro-droplets of the sea.

The ground underfoot felt solid, earthy, tangible in a way he never realized he missed until this moment. Dirt and grime coated every single cobblestone but they still managed to gleam in his eyes when he could tear his gaze from the sky. If he could, he would stand just like this and drink it all in, stand as still as a statue until ivy wrapped around his body in a green embrace and moss collected along his jawline and pigeons used him as a roost. Okay, probably not that last part, but up until that point it was a nice fantasy.

And there was something else, too. Something almost ethereal, not solid like the ground and not breathtakingly beautiful like the sky and not as exhilarating as the wind. He rolled the new sensation around in his head, let it take root in his brain until his tongue could parse the treacherous feeling into words.

Time, he realized. Time was passing. Outside the fairy realm, outside the worst of the Goblin King’s influence, time could pass freely. No longer was he held suspended in the breath between moments, a spider dangled in an airless room where the sun never rises or sets in a world of perpetual constancy. Distantly he became aware of a steady throbbing, no, a ticking, and without taking his eyes off a fluffy cloud he reached into his inner breast pocket and took hold of a cool, round something. Carefully he brought it out into the light (real daylight, so pure he could almost _drink_ it!) and surveyed the little gold, ticking circle that fit in his palm like it was made for him specifically. He depressed a little button on its side and it flipped open, revealing a cream-colored clock face with three black hands on the one half, but it was the other half that caught his attention. Quite a different face there, a sepia-toned photograph, that started out small and was carefully if inexpertly cut to fit snuggly inside the pocket watch’s lid. A woman with dark curls and cool eyes and full lips stared back at him. She was familiar to him; she was the kind of woman you call “Ma’am,” the kind of woman you open doors for, pull out chairs for, the kind of woman you protect with words instead of violence, the kind of woman you kiss when and only when you have her gun hand and knife hand held tightly in your own. Her photo did not smile, but a keen eye could detect something like mischief in the corners of her mouth despite the steel of her gaze. The pocket watch ticked in his palm, a tiny mechanical heartbeat that counted the seconds between breaths. He closed the watch with a quiet click and turned on his heel to survey his crew.

The witches had never come this far, that much was apparent. The problem with the Goblin King was that he got Ideas, and most of his Ideas were so astronomically stupid his castle should have an entire wing devoted to philosophers and astronomers to estimate approximately how stupid they were. But as far as the king was concerned, the Winter Marauder was more or less walking, talking property so _he_ didn’t get a vote. Which was a crying shame because the Marauder had no qualms about walking onto any boat and singlehandedly taking what the king wanted. Instead, he got saddled with a pair of gibbering mostly-goblins who spent every waking eternity in the fairy realm instead of occasionally gaining their land legs on their native plane.

The twins crouched on the cobbles, eyes screwed tight shut and hands clamped over their ears. It was at that moment Winter became aware that passersby were slowing as they passed, staring, whispering behind their hands. He should probably be embarrassed right about now, but it seemed the part of his heart responsible for those kind of emotions had yet to thaw. He did a quick inventory: Labari was as purple and bright as ever, so that would need to be addressed before a mob with torches and pitchforks came for them; the twins, in typical goblin fashion, were out of commission in a world of time and space and reality; up until now Winter himself had been staring at the sky, probably (definitely) with his mouth open. The four of them could, at this point, pass as a horde of idiots with only minimum suspicion. He rubbed his eyes. If there were gods, they collectively hated him personally.

 

Clint Barton’s day started out weird and just kept going. The events of the past 24 hours boiled down to these: he went undercover on the Lemurian Star to ensure the Tesseract arrived safely to port, the demigod Loki arrived to take the Tesseract, he put the entire crew under his spell and now Clint worked for a whole new employer. Loki didn’t make for a bad commanding officer, but Clint still didn’t appreciate the magic or the career shift.

He sidled up to the new boss and drummed his fingers against his clipboard until Loki turned away from the cabin window to scowl at him. “What?”

“Sir, I represent the worker’s union. Some of the crew voiced concerns about the sudden change in leadership and I was hoping to put those concerns to rest. Do you have a minute?”

Loki stared, lips parted. “Do I… _what_?”

“Right, right,” Clint grunted, reviewing the list. “The most salient complaint was about the necessary amount of lemons on board.”

“Lemons.”

“Eeeeeyup,” he confirmed, popping the P for emphasis. “Every boat that goes on a voyage longer than a couple weeks needs to have an abundant source of vitamin C for its crew; I know there’s nothing sexier than scurvy but the younger kids seem rather partial to all their teeth. In addition to preventing disease, lemons are very bright and colorful morale boosters and, in the case of catastrophic capsizing, they are buoyant as hell.”

“Is this some kind of Midgardian joke?” Loki demanded slowly. He watched Clint, green eyes boring into him and the spell he was under wiggled unpleasantly in his skull.

Clint squinted back at him. “I never joke about workers’ rights or the buoyancy of citrus. Sir.”

Loki was the one to break the silence next. He turned away with a growl, his green mantle flaring about him and ran his hands through his wild black hair. “Your insouciance is not appreciated, Barton,” he spat. “You are dismissed.”

Under an intrusive geas he might be, but there is no version of Clint Barton, magical or otherwise, that follows orders on the first go. He sighed and tossed the clipboard on the desk. “What’s this all really about, boss?”

“I said—“

“Yeah, I heard what ya said; I’m only partially deaf. But you show up on this boat looking like hell warmed over, you do nothing but make sad eyes at the ocean, and you’re taking the Tesseract like you don’t even want it. We all heard your spiel about world domination—it was very moving and eloquent, don’t get me wrong—but you hightailed it out of Asgard, where world-dominating would be relatively easy since you’re the crown prince, to come push around a world of mortals you don’t really understand. So what’s the scoop?”

Loki glowered, and if his face were anything to go by he was about two minutes away from hexing Clint into next week. And that was too bad; the geas put Clint as his second-in-command, so he had no intention of letting Loki off easy. He had too many handlers with that hunted look about them, so he knew from personal experience that it was only a matter of time before Loki imploded, too. And then the resolve left him all at once and his shoulders slumped and he looked old, even for a demigod. “Barton, you’ll drive me to drink.”

“Should be some good brandy in the desk, sir.”

The desk did indeed hide good brandy and a pair of tumblers. They sat across from each other, drinking and letting the silence stretch. Loki finished his glass in a few draughts and refilled it before he started to speak. “This stays between you and me, understand?”

“Understood.”

Loki regarded him over the lip of his glass. “I can never go home again,” he murmured. “My home is no more. My father is enthralled by the same eldritch forces that compel me to fetch the Tesseract. My brother is…no longer fit to lead. My consolation prize, your earth, will be so much dust and flotsam by the end of the coming storm. There is no stopping it. There is no weathering it. The storm will come, and no amount of trickery or magic can soften the blow.” He knocked back his drink.

Clint took the decanter and poured another healthy dose into Loki’s cup. “Tell me.”

 

“I hate this,” Quicksilver bitched between gritted teeth. The Winter Marauder paid him no mind, but in the dark, safe space between his ash gray shirt and black waistcoat Labari stirred. While the Marauder walked like he had somewhere to go, the twins trudged bitterly in his wake. Their boots scraped across the cobblestones and occasionally they would sway into each other on their feet. Witch had yet to take her hands off her ears and had a look of intense consternation on her face, occasional red sparks shooting up when her feet met the street. Her brother seemed to be powering through it, though he also looked like he hated everything and everyone. He clenched his fists hard enough to whiten his knuckles. “It’s like walking through mud. Waist high mud,” he snarled.

Winter pointedly did not roll his eyes, but even so red magic flared briefly around Witch’s head, whipping her dark hair around. “It’s time!” she lamented. “Time is just _passing_!”

Quicksilver paused at the mouth of an alley and leaned his head against the rough brickwork. “The king would put me through drills.” He bumped his head against the wall with a solid thunk. “He would put me in a room where time would pass just willy-nilly.” Thunk. “It was horrible.” Thunk. “And it feels like I’m drowning in it!” Thunk.

“It feels like falling!” Red wailed and joined her brother, banging her head against the wall beside him. A pair of watchmen paused on their patrol to watch them, hands going to their truncheons. These twin morons were going to get them all killed.

The Marauder gently pulled them away from the wall and gave the watchmen a commiserating smile. _Idiots, what can ya do?_ “Cease and desist,” he growled at them, giving them both a hard shake for good measure. “Time happens. You need to pull yourselves together and get your land legs or I’m going to string you both up to a flagpole and finish the mission on my own.”

The red witch stared up at him with teary eyes. “How can you stand it! How can you live with the falling!”

He wet his lips. “It doesn’t feel like falling to me.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It feels like _flying_.”

Red blinked up at him, and for a moment he believed she understood that the world was a strange and cruel and wonderful place if only you could change your perspective, shift your imagination to the circumstances. And then Labari poked her traitorous head out of his collar. “Bullshit! Flying is amazing and this is awful.”

Too late he heard the clop-clop of steel-toed boots on cobbles and turned to see the watchmen approach, truncheons at the ready. “Sir, we need to ask you what you have in your coat.”

Winter’s face twisted. “My body.”

The watchmen didn’t even blink. “Sir, hand over the fairy for confiscation.” He tapped the end of his baton at the lump under the Marauder’s coat, making Labari shriek curses at him.

“This is all a huge misunderstanding,” Winter yelled over Labari’s accusations concerning the officer’s mother’s virtue. “This is a trained parrot, very exotic,” he called over a handful of colorful descriptions of the officer’s lineage. “All the parrots in the mountains by the High Temple are purple and white and curse like sailors. It’s the mountain air, y’see,” He said over a graphic compare and contrast of the watchman’s face and the back end of a horse. He stuck a pair of metal fingers in Labari’s filthy beak and she gurgled and snarled around the digits, clicking loudly as she tried to chomp through them unsuccessfully. “My name is Ponce Cornondecawb, I run a troupe of wandering minstrels. These are my cousins, Scarlett Cornondecawb and Sal Cornondecawb.” He glanced at the twins. They were staring at him with their mouths hanging open; a bruise was beginning to form on Quicksilver’s forehead. “As you can see they are both of them deaf and mute and dumb.” Red scowled. “Extremely dumb. Now if you’ll excuse us, sirrahs, we must away.” He tried to hurry the twins ahead of him with his flesh arm while Labari continued to attack his metal hand, but the more vocal of the two watchmen stopped him short, pressing his truncheon against Winter’s Adam’s apple.

“My, good minstrel, what big ears you have,” the watchman growled. “And what big ears your ‘cousins’ have as well. Tell me, do you peddle illicit pixie dust, or just potential changelings.”

“I am a humble minstrel,” the Winter Marauder answered coldly.

“Ah,” the watchman sighed. “And what is you speciality, m’lord?” he continued, pronouncing it like ‘spesh-ee-ality.’ Everyone, regardless of code or creed, must draw a line somewhere and Winter drew it right here.

“Knife throwing. Would you like a demonstration?”

 

Steve watched the foam crested waves of the sea recede as the ship gained altitude. Never in his life did he think he would step onto another voyaging boat, let alone an airship. Howard always talked about building one, about the lucrative avenues available for the first man to make viable transport across the sky instead of the sea. Steve did not often allow himself to think of Howard, but for a moment he indulged himself.

“I can see you wallowing.”

Steve startled, releasing a totally manly yawp and whirling on his heel. Natasha watched him, eyebrow raised. “I’m not wallowing,” he sputtered.

She gave him a sympathetic nod. “Of course not.”

“I really wasn’t.”

“I’m sure.”

“Can I help you with something?”

Her lips twitched and something in her eyes held the promise of mischief. “I just wanted to see how you were settling in. Well, I hope.”

“I’m fine. A regular fish out of water, but that’s to be expected.” He gave her a wry smile and gestured out the window. The Avenger swayed gently about them, buoyed by the winds, but there was no mistaking the turbulence for the sea.

“It is quite the feat,” she remarked. “Men were not meant to fly, or else the Creator might have given us wings. But here we are.”

“Here we are.”

“Too bad for Loki; we’re hot on his trail, ETA three hours. You should get some sleep.”

“I’ll try,” he lied. Natasha’s lips twitched again, like she wanted to add something but thought better of it, and she turned away and headed back into the cabin/lab where Dr. Banner crunched through his calculations.

She picked up one of his sheets of calculations from its pile and gave it a cursory once over. Banner watched her from the corner of his eye. Natasha made a show of nodding and putting the paper back where she found it, then nudged it two and a half inches to the left so it hung off the stack. Banner chewed his cheek. “The woodlands, huh?”

“Yes. Technically speaking I’m not a medical doctor, but I know enough to do some good. I’m marginally better than nothing,” he tacked on with a self-deprecating smile.

She lifted a chunk of pink quartz from its stand and examined it, weighing it in her palm. “Lot of gamma radiation in the woodlands?”

“Ah, no. You find gamma radiation in sinkholes, where the barriers between realms are…thin. Um, would you mind putting that back?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, but gently replaced the quartz on its stand. Upside down. “How did you come to study radiation, if you don’t mind my asking?” She prowled along the bookcase of reference materials and outdated peer-reviewed journal.

“I’ve always been interested in the natural sciences, as well as the lines drawn between our world and the others.” He gave up all pretenses of working and watched her prowl to and fro in front of the bookcase. He leaned against his work bench, hands open and relaxed on the edge of the counter, keeping himself open and nonthreatening. In his experience curious people also tended to be dangerous people, and if he read her right, Miss Romanoff could be a very dangerous soul indeed. She paid him no attention, instead selecting a slender volume from the top shelf and flipping through the yellowed pages. “How did you come to work in the privateering business?”

She faced away from him so he couldn’t see her face entirely, but he did note the way her cheek lifted in a smile. The pages whispered under her abuse. “I was born to it. It took me many moons to readjust to human life, but spy work is the same wherever you go. Piracy doubly so.” She slotted her book back on its shelf, three spaces over from its original place. “I’ve been in the same business all my life, but not you. You went from researching the natural sciences of interworldly barriers to amateur medicine.”

“You simply would not believe how much the two have in common,” he remarked, tinder dry.

“Oh, I believe it,” she countered. “The barrier between the real world and the world of the fae is as perfectly permeable as it is impregnable. So too are the barriers between life and death, between words and thought, between what we can see and feel and hear and the darkness under our skin.” She watched him, hands still. “But you went from leading the field in radiation research to administering country medicine. What does it cost to turn back on everything you build and start a new life? A toothache? A bad hair day?”

Banner turned away, skin crawling, but he couldn’t help himself. “And what does it cost to cross an impermeable divide and build everything from scratch?” he snarled. His nails carved furrows into the black finish on his workbench, but he could control himself. He must.

Natasha strode to the doorway, unhurried, a predator’s gait. She paused there, eyes distant with memories. “Oh, that’s an easy one, good doctor,” she replied in a sickly sweet sing-song tone. Her smile resurfaced, sharp and terrible. “It costs exactly one name.”

 

“Was that strictly necessary?” Quicksilver demanded. The three of them were breathless, leaning against the wall of a different alley. Witch—Winter had begun thinking of her as Scarlett and couldn’t be bothered to correct himself—braced her hands against her knees and wheezed, the whites of her eyes prominent, her face pale. Then her brother’s own ashen face turned an ungainly shade of green and he abruptly turned to be violently sick against the wall. Scarlett and the Winter Marauder padded a few feet upwind.

“We were going to be made,” Winter explained when Quicksilver had quite finished. “It was either fight or waste valuable time in a jail cell somewhere.”

“You didn’t have to cut anyone’s _ears off_! I could have bewitched them,” Scarlett said from where she propped herself against the wall. “I could have given them visions.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I don’t know!” she snapped. “Everything is strange and new. I suppose I panicked.”

“Next time don’t panic,” the Marauder ordered before Quicksilver could try his hand at wit. “You see an opening, you go in for the kill. Until then, what do you need to scry the Tesseract?”

She shrugged. “A dark mirror for preference, but seeing as his kingship never felt the need to give me one, a saucer with some ink would do.”

Since Scarlett was going to be doing the proverbial heavy lifting, the Winter Marauder had Quicksilver procure the saucer and ink. Winter and Scarlett took up residence at a table in a mostly empty pub and watched him cajole a barmaid into lending him the desired materials. “Are…are they flirting?” Scarlett asked while the transaction at the bar grew more and more stilted.

Winter unstuffed his fist from his mouth. “No,” he choked out. “The barman is flirting. Silver is being an idiot.”

She nodded slowly. “You mean barmaid.”

“Possibly, but that’s none of my business. You know what they say about barmaids with big hands.”

She frowned. “No. What do they say about barmaids with big hands?”

“They wear big gloves.” And then the Winter Marauder bit down on his fist again.

The witch squinted at him. “I’m missing some important cultural cues, aren’t I.”

“Mm-hm,” he giggled, and forced himself back to composure as Quicksilver rejoined their table, a saucer and inkwell cradled in one hand and a tumbler brimming with spiced rum in the other. Scarlett took the former and Winter relieved him of the latter. Quicksilver dropped heavily into the remaining chair and stared bewildered into space.

“She said the rum was on the house. ”

“Tastes like free booze,” the Winter Marauder remarked with a tentative sip. A few flecks of sawdust floated on the drink’s surface and he drank them down without a second thought. Free fiber. He pushed the glass Quicksilver’s way, and the kid lifted it to his lips briefly. Very briefly.

He coughed and sputtered. “That’s terrible!”

“Me next! Me next!” Scarlett cried, and pounced on the drink.

“You need to keep a clear head for magic-making,” Winter scolded her half-heartedly. She was already taking a sip, and like her brother started coughing and sputtering.

“Why do people drink this?” she spluttered.

Winter took the glass from her hand and swirled the dark liquid inside. “The Goblin King can take away our memories at will, if we are troubled or…or noncompliant. Humans have no such advantage. They drink to forget for a few hours. Of course their memories are there again when they dry out, but usually by then they have more immediate problems to deal with, like ‘Who is in my bed’ or ‘Why did I spend my rent money on free rounds for everyone.’”

“That sounds inefficient,” Quicksilver noted.

“Humans have been accused of many things. Efficiency is not one of them.”

Scarlett dribbled ink into a puddle on the saucer and squinted at it, brow furrowed. “I see the Tesseract,” she told them softly. The Winter Marauder saw ink, but it must have been meaningful to witches because Quicksilver leaned over and stared into the saucer.

He clucked to himself. “On a boat. Demigod aboard as well.”

“I can handle a demigod,” Winter assured them.

Scarlett shook her head. “And there’s another ship coming for them. An airship.”

“A what now?”

“It flies,” Quicksilver explained. “With big old balloons, headed straight for our prize.”

Winter planted his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “I’ve seen a fruit fly, I’ve seen a house fly, but I ain’t never seen a boat fly. How long before they intercept?”

“Not long,” Scarlett replied. “We need to move. Now.”

“Hear that Labari?” Winter popped open the button on his waistcoat. Labari stirred and untucked her head from her wing, blinking owlishly in the light. “It’s time we get a move on.”

Labari grunted and stretched, untucking herself from his coat. Her feathers ruffled and puffed up before smoothing back down. “Well, no time like the present,” she chirped.

 

“We’re almost on top of the Lemurian Star.”

Steve looked up from his sketch to find Fury almost on top of _him_ , towering over where he sat on the floor. He closed his sketchpad and dropped his pencil stub in his pocket, got to his feet. “Understood, sir.”

Fury nodded. “Before we get started, there’s something I wanted to show you.” Fury led him out of the dormitory and down the hall, through a sliding locked door that led into a dark weapons hoard. Gun powder and oil hung heavy on the breathless air. Fury shouldered aside a stack of bayonets and fished out a round thing from the shadows.

“My shield,” Steve breathed. The round vibranium disk hung heavy in his hands. He turned it over and over, running his fingers cautiously over the paintjob, marveling at the rich colors. “You painted it.” In the two years serving on the Howling Commando, no one bothered to lay paint on his shield. Howard kicked around ideas—if he had his way, he would have laid greens and browns and reds over the vibranium in some kind of chemical reaction so that Her Ladyship’s favorite colors could never wash or be burnt off. More than once Steve hid his shield to prevent Howard’s tampering; it was a slippery slope from a simple paintjob to mounting lasers to the middle. He could always count on Bucky to help him hide it; if Bucky hid something, it stayed hidden. Steve tamped down on the curl of unease that coiled in his gut. it didn't do to think of Bucky too much, so he looked over his shield for another long moment. The straps were as Steve remembered them, though someone took care to oil and repair the cracked leather and reinforce the bindings between straps and shield.

Fury smirked. “The colors are very you, I think. You have Howard Stark’s son to thank for that.” Steve looked up sharply. Fury leaned against the wall next to a half-open crate labelled _Artillery._ He crossed his arms. “Since you didn’t care, the shield went to Howard’s remaining kin, and the kid took the Howling Commandos’ flag and painted it on your shield. Of course, I just about had to beat him with a broom handle to keep him from mounting spikes or lasers or some damn thing to the middle."

Steve nodded, numb. “Some things never change.” He slid the shield over his arm and it fit like it belonged there. He should put it back. He should give it to someone else—anyone else. He shouldn’t…he didn’t deserve to wear Stark weaponry, let alone Stark Weaponry emblazoned with his ship’s colors. He opened his mouth to apologize, to give the shield back, but what came out was “Thank you. Colonel.”

“Don’t thank me,” Fury said with a wave of his hand. “When we were outfitting this boat, I didn’t even think of bringing your shield along.” And then, quicker than such a large man should be able to move, he bent and heaved the artillery crate over on its side, spilling out a dozen musket balls and a squawking teenage boy. “What did I tell you!” Fury bellowed at the boy.

He rolled onto his back and propped himself on his elbows, giving an all-too-familiar saucy grin. “Long time no see, Nick. How’s the Avenger? Flies like a dream, right?” Without bothering to get to his feet, he swiveled his head around to give Steve a once over. “This is the guy my dad never shut up about?”

Steve gaped. “This is the kid Howard never shut up about?”

“What?”

The ship shuddered. The lights in the hall flickered and turned red. Fury pinched the bridge of his nose. “ _You_ are going to sit quietly in a nice dark room and not get murdered. _You_ are going to lead the crew in a massive firefight to recover the Tesseract while I keep this boat airborne.” Steve nodded and followed Fury at a sprint down the reddened hall, up the stairs and into the main cabin.

 

“We’ve made contact, sir!” Barton barked. The hull groaned underfoot as the Avenger returned fire.

Loki swayed with the ship, eyes fixed on the fools who would try to stand between him and his prize. “Do not spare them!” he snarled. Barton saluted and aimed the canon just so while all about them the bewitched crew and deckhands scrambled.

Barton pressed a palm to his good ear for protection and lit the fuse. “Fire in the hole!” The cannon banged impossibly loud and shot back against its rigging from the recoil. The iron ball struck true, taking out not the Avenger herself but one of the main air balloons holding her aloft. Clint nudged the cannon back in position with his hip while he pulled another cannonball from the pile.

Loki cast spells of protection over the Lemurian Star, even while she shuddered and groaned. The Avenger’s answering fire landed mostly in the water, sending up spray and waves to rock the boat and frighten the crew.

“Fire in the hole!”

Loki did not spare Barton a glance, but the part of him that still had the strength to simmer with resentment took a moment to envy him. What must it be like, to fire upon one’s own company under a geas? Without worry or guilt in the moment? What must it be like, to look death full in the face and proceed without fear?

“Fire in the hole!”

 

The Avenger shuddered. The floor beneath Natasha and Bruce’s feet groaned, fractured, creaked. They scarcely had time to draw breath before it gave out completely and they were falling to the floor below in a heap of splinters and dust. Dazed, Natasha took stock of their situation: her ankle was twisted, and she was trapped under nearly twice her body weight in treated lumber. Worse yet, an iron nail stabbed into her thigh—the flesh bubbled and her blood recoiled. She hissed and writhed, happy to remove her entire leg from her body for that one blasted nail, but she had nothing sharp enough to do the job.

And then she looked up to get Bruce’s status and everything went from bad to worse. He panted, eyes rolling in his head, the crumpled floor layered atop his back heaving with every breath. His eyes fixed on her. They glowed. “Doctor Banner?” she choked out. He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. No, he _thrashed_. “Doctor Banner,” she repeated, gathering strength she didn’t even have. “I will get you out of this. We are gonna make it.”

He screamed, mouth opened wide and teeth elongating even as she watched. She squirmed under the weight of the debris, sending pieces of floor scattering. The nail dug at her, tore through her bubbling flesh and sent rivulets of hot blood down her thigh. She grit her teeth against her own scream. Bruce snarled, bones creaking as they rejected his innate shape, face too long. Well, if her ankle was sprained anyway…she yanked hard and it gave an unpleasant pop. She scrambled away from the wreckage just as Bruce—no, not Bruce— _the thing_ shouldered its way free and gave a bellow the rattled the ship.

She flopped down with a strangled sob, clawed the nail out of her thigh, and waited for the inevitable because she wasn’t going to be moving anywhere on her leg now. In the red emergency lights she saw it whole and unfettered. A behemoth of a beast, a regular hulking monster, drew itself to its full height on four legs, standing taller than a man, perhaps taller even than a horse. Coarse brown fur grew along its feral snout and down its back, and where the hair didn’t grow green-tinted flesh peered through. It’s eyes were the size of dinner plates, glowing green with lurid yellow around their edges. It unleashed another blood-curdling snarl that became a howl halfway through, loud enough to pain her eardrums. It swung its great lupine head down at her, scenting blood and terror, and she unleashed her own feral scream, tears running down her face because she didn’t intend to go out like this, but damn it if she didn’t die the way she lived: covered in blood and facing monsters she could never hope to defeat. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can learn more about the bouyancy of citrus [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC-4tWx5Gv4).
> 
> My headcanon is that Bucky is actually a really good agent in any and all universes, but he super sucks at coming up with good cover names on the fly. Which is why he is Ponce Cornondecawb in a pinch.
> 
> I almost titled this chapter the Sleepwalking Elite because Scarlett and Quicksilver make me giggle. But I didn't.
> 
> While limes are traditional for voyages, lemons have nearly double the vitamin C. Lemons are the kind of premier fruit a conscientious pirate union would lobby for.


	3. This Ship's Going Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time was a-wasting. Now, for the real question: if he were a Tesseract, where would he hide?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title for this chapter comes from Voltaire's ["This Ship's Going Down"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5f3-jB0-do).

Labari banked hard toward the apparent destruction on the sea. Tucked between her shoulder blades, feathers gripped tight in both of his hands, the Winter Marauder watched as the airship, the Avenger, fell. It fell slowly, almost gracefully, back to the sea. “Take out the Tesseract’s ship’s wards,” he growled, and Scarlett pushed the complex protection magic away from the Lemurian Star, as easily as a child blows bubbles across the surface of a bath. “Here we go!” the Winter Marauder called, tugging his handkerchief up to protect his nose and mouth from the worst of the smoke and spray. Labari spiraled in steeper and tighter circles, down, down, down. “Roll when you touch down, and whatever you do don’t die!” And then the three of them pitched themselves from Labari’s back and into the fray. Labari watched her charges drop through the blue smoke and onto the Lemurian Star’s scarred deck. She beat her wings hard twice to avoid a shower of musket fire, pulled a barrel roll because she was a magnificent flier, and let her body fold in on itself until she was back to her convenient, hard-to-shoot-at size.

The Avenger crashed into the ocean with a spray of salt water and the ominous creak of distressed lumber meeting unwelcome resistance, but the hull held its integrity. The Avengers cast grappling hooks across the space between ships, hooking the Lemurian Star in iron and rope; some of the crew clambered across the ropes even while the Stars (Lemurs?) frantically got to work slashing their ship free. Most of the Avengers stayed aboard their own vessel, though, and cranked the ropes taut, forcibly dragging the Lemurian Star ever closer.

Steve knew the risks of vaulting across the ropes, but threw caution to the wind in the face of the mission and threw himself onto the Lemurian Star. Once aboard, he drew his cutlass and picked through the knots of fighting sailors—five years of playing bouncer for Miss Tiffany prepared him well. Wind whipped in the rigging, yanked at the tattered sails and sent a chill all the way down his spine. Amidst the screaming and the smoke, the musket reports and the intermittent boom of canons, thunder rolled in the distance, thick and dark and heavy.

For a moment, he spied a dark figure dressed in a shirt the color of damp ash and a black waist coat, longish brown hair whipping about his face. Before the assailant could disappear into the rapid scurry of bodies Steve headed him off, catching him before he could make it to the cabin. “Halt!” Steve bellowed. The flash of tempered steel gave away the man’s intentions and Steve only just got his shield up in time to deflect the bite of his rapier.

The stranger’s icy blue eyes burned above the handkerchief hiding the lower half of his face. “Stand and deliver!” he challenged before lunging at Steve again.

 

The Stars that could be spared spilled across the negligible divide between ships and set about taking the Avenger with extreme prejudice. At the helm, Fury braced himself as three of the bastards poured into his control room. His hands tightened on the wheel; if he released it now, the Lemurian Star could pull the Avenger wherever she pleased, possibly stranding the offending Avengers in enemy territory. Of course, it wouldn’t make much difference if the Stars—no, he decided to call them Lemurs, fuck ‘em—if the Lemurs on his damn boat cut him down where he stood.

The first one he took out with a well-aimed slug from his pistol, but then the other two fell upon him and all might have been lost if not for a saber coming down hard on the one’s shoulder and the third falling with another report of Fury’s gun. The Lemurs hit the floor.

“I told you to stay below deck!” Fury bellowed while Tony ran a greasy rag over his saber.

“You’re welcome!” Tony bellowed back. His hands shook. Fury subsided with an angry shake of his head.

“Grab the wheel—we need to keep close to the Star.” Tony cut him a sloppy salute and staggered for the wheel, not arguing for once in his life.

 

The stranger was fast and brutal, matching each of Steve’s thrusts with a neat parry and delivering thrusts of his own. All about them men lost their heads, both figuratively and literally. Despite the scrambling of the crews, the smoke and steady musket fire, the rage of the distant storm fast approaching, Steve could hear only his own thundering heart and the caress of steel over steel.

And then the masked man twisted his wrist in an unnatural way and Steve’s cutlass hit the deck with a clank. The rapier hit his shield next, the steel screaming against the vibranium, and Steve slid into the opening, making a frantic grab for the man but only catching the handkerchief as he darted just out of reach. The dark cloth fluttered to the ground and he raised his rapier, jaw set.

Steve’s jaw dropped. “Bucky?”

“Who the hell is Bucky?” he growled, before a great big white and purple _something_ fell upon Steve, allowing the man, allowing _Bucky_ , to beat a hasty retreat. Steve beat the bird away from him, earning a few scratches to his cheek but keeping his eyes and ears intact. He rolled and raised his shield, the bird connecting with a hard ping and it cussed him out like a proper sailor before sulking away into the sail rigging above. Bucky was gone.

Steve retrieved his cutlass and pushed and shoved through the fighting, delivering quick jabs here and there until he made it to the cabin. He kicked the door open and marched into the dark and relative quiet of the room only to come face to face with a severely unimpressed demigod. Well, at least he knew he headed in the right direction.

Loki’s lips curled. He advanced on silent feet at a leisurely pace and Steve braced himself for a fight. When artefacts of eldritch origin are on the line, he could never afford to back down, even in the face of a demigod. Steve raised his shield and held his cutlass aloft. Outside, thunder rumbled low and discontent. Rain drops plinked against the roof and windows. “Have at ye!” Steve roared and lunged at Loki.

 

The hem of her shirt and a short length of flat wood planking served as a suitable brace for her busted ankle, not that she had any intention of putting weight on it.

At least not when she was having so much fun!

“Cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war!” Natasha cackled from between the great, hulking behemoth’s furry shoulders. It howled and stamped through the basement of the Avenger. It took a few minutes, but Natasha gathered that despite its appearance and temperament, it wasn’t entirely brainless; a few encouraging noises and a healthy application of her heels to his flanks sent him charging up the stairs. She clutched the wiry fur tight in her fists. “Wheeeeeee!” she squealed as they broke through the staircase and scrambled across the deck, slick with rain. “Not that one! That one’s with us!” she barked when the Hulk started menacing a knot of Avengers. “This way! This way! Let’s get on the other boat, c’mon!”

 

Loki did not bother with swords, nor did he bother with hexes or spells. Instead he took out a pair of wicked looking daggers and leaned into Steve hard. Steve parried and blocked where he could, but one blade jabbed hard into the meat of his shoulder, sending him rolling across the floor. “You haven’t long now,” Loki assured him. He wasn’t even breathing hard. Steve pushed himself up from his knees and brandished his cutlass. “Is this what passes for human dramatics?” Loki inquired, brow raised. He flicked one of his daggers so that droplets of Steve’s blood spattered across the floor. “Is this loyalty? Tell me, what makes you. So. Special?” On the last syllable he lunged and Steve caught his blade on the edge of his shield. Loki twisted his hand, using the snag as leverage and gave a mighty heave until they stood nose to nose.

Steve stared up into green eyes absolutely seething with madness. “I’m just a fisherman off the docks,” he breathed. His vision went spotty, going fuzzy around the edges, and he commanded his legs to move but it seemed his body wasn’t taking orders just now.

Loki slapped the cutlass out of his grip, and shoved the shield to the floor before gripping Steve tight about the throat. “You haven’t long now,” Loki assured him again, forcibly dragging him to the window. “I treat all my blades with a potent neurotoxin found only in the depths of the sea.” He kicked the window out, glass shards tinkling distantly in the rushing of Steve’s ears. Rain fell. Thunder boomed. Loki lifted Steve’s limp body and looked him in the face. His eyes no longer seethed—they seemed cold somehow, dispassionate, like he resigned himself to his fate. Steve let his head loll between his shoulders. He was so tired.

“So this is the great Captain Rogers,” Loki marveled. “The last of the Howling Commandos. A living folk hero for your people, but I think we both know the truth.” Loki slapped his face to get Steve’s attention, a smile curling his mouth. “Tell me, Captain: how many of your crew did you watch drown while you saved yourself?”

Steve didn’t have strength in him anymore, but the overwhelming rage boiled inside of him and Loki’s hand was too close to his face—he could see it in his peripheral vision—and he turned his head and chomped down for all he was worth.

Most people’s faces turn red when they are angry. Loki’s turned bone white. “Stupid mortal,” he snarled, wrenching his hand free of Steve’s teeth. The skin split and hot, dark blood flooded his mouth with the taste of iron, dripped liberally down his chin and into his shirt. The grip on Steve’s neck tightened. “Your people seem to be under the impression that you’re immortal,” Loki spat. “Let’s test that theory!”

Time didn’t slow down, but it did stretch. Steve couldn’t see anything—gray blotted out his vision—and everything he could hear seemed to filter into him through a long, long tunnel. He fell, thrown through the window by Loki, and let his body go limp. Time stretched. He could feel every individual raindrop hitting his face, his hands, sinking cold and sharp through his clothing. The wind whistled about him, itself like a living thing, filled with the scent of the sea and the promise of a long summer still to come.

Steve fell while time stretched, but when he made contact with the surface of the ocean time seemed to catch up with itself, a rubber band stretched just shy of its breaking point and snapping back into place. And that was the end of Captain Steve Rogers, the last of the Howling Commandos, the only Commando who never gave his life in service to Her Ladyship. The sea folded over him, biting cold, and he sank into the dark of its depths.

 

The Winter Marauder dodged a knot of brawling sailors and ducked into a shadow to catch his breath. _He knew me!_ How long had he been under the Goblin King’s control? Seventy years? A hundred? But the blond fighter saw him and knew him. The Winter Marauder shook himself—maybes and could have beens shouldn’t distract him from the mission. The pocket watch sat heavy in his breast pocket; time was a-wasting.

Now, for the real question: if he were a Tesseract, where would he hide?

 

Stand in the middle of a stream. No, make it a river. The kind of river that is high and fast from a spring of heavy rains and a winter of heavier snows. Take the river and cut it into ribbons as fine or thick as you like. Now take a pond, green and fetid from bovine attentions, its surface as warm as a bath from the unrelenting summer sun—take that pond and cut it like the river. Do the same to the chuckling streams of your childhood, where the frogs were never seen but heard, and the drainage ditch you might have known from a previous life with its banks sporting cattails and wild carrots, fat white flowers bobbing on the breeze. Take for thread a stormy lake where the bitter winds have whipped its gray surface into a lather, small waves lapping against a shore choked with ice. Bind the river and the pond and the stream and the drainage ditch with thread built from your lake and when it is done, lay the mosaic whole over a bed of madness, warm and cold and hostile and pounding. Pounding. Pounding.

Quicksilver could feel the tug and pull of time like a current. High and fast and low and slow and hot and cold and never consistent from one moment to the next. This is what humans don’t know: time is largely subjective in that your garden variety human can speed it up or slow it down at will. And they do. They usually don’t realize they’re doing it because it has become so ingrained as to be second nature; they never speak of it to one another the same way they never speak of breathing air or the ideal mineral deposits in the earth for bipedal locomotion. Time moved inconsistently and Quicksilver, for all his practice under the Goblin Kings tutelage, felt himself drowning. And underneath it all time moved, pulsed, like a mammoth thing, like the ocean, like the Winter Marauder’s pocket watch stretched to the nth degree, a time different from the superficial eddies the humans in his vicinity stirred. Lay a mosaic of the lake and river and stream and pond and ditch over the push and pull of the ocean in all its glory and keep your head above water.

Quicksilver shoved Scarlett out of the way of a flying arrow and glared balefully at the offending archer. The man, flecked with gunpowder, dour-faced and cold-eyed, drew another bolt and knocked it, taking aim for the space between Quicksilver’s eyes. Time eddied, swirled, pulled all around him, impossible to parse, and he was drowning and falling at once but…

Take a mosaic, not particularly attractive but a mosaic nonetheless, take a mosaic of ribboned river and stream and ditch and pond, held together by a thread of lake and laid atop the rage of the ocean. Take a mosaic and step from one ribbon to the next and

let

go.

 He moved as if in a dream, the footsteps coming to him as naturally as breathing and twice as easy. Underneath the deck, through his shoes, he could feel the pulse of time itself, the steady tick of the universe pulsing its way to oblivion, a heartbeat that never stuttered, not even for him. But above that pulse Quicksilver moved at his own pace, about one-hundred times faster than any other man on this boat—even his sister stood frozen in her own ribbon on the mosaic, red light flashing in her hands and along her eyelashes. He took the bow from dour man carefully, prying it from strong, calloused fingers, and tossed it across the deck.

All at once he felt himself slipping and staggered back just in time to avoid the archer’s fist to his face. For a moment he was falling, suffocating, but he found his equilibrium enough to take his sister in his arms and scurry her out of harm’s way.

“What was that!?” Scarlett squawked, slapping at his arms.

“I don’t know!” he squawked back at her.

Something large and hairy and green snarled and crashed through the Lumerian Star’s rigging. Scarlett’s grip on her brother’s shirt tightened. “What the hell was that!?”

“I don’t know!”

Clint Barton scrabbled briefly, very briefly, for his bow—wherever Speedy McWitchguy threw it—but had to duck and roll to keep from being trampled by something big and green and _pissed off_. “Hello, Barton,” an all-too familiar voice simpered from between the great hulk’s shoulders.

“Natasha!” he warned. Squinting through the rain and the smoke, he could see Natasha leaning over to leer at him, teeth bared in her patented murder-smile. The Hulk howled and stamped at him, but Clint dodged and rolled and wedged himself into the cabin where it could not follow.

Broken glass littered the floor and the place smelled of blood and grease and sulfur; Loki had been here very recently, and magicked himself somewhere else (hence the sulfur stink). He braced himself against the door and sank to the ground, mind racing. In this state, if he knew Natasha at all, she should be going through a full blown relapse. Which was bad news for her recovery, but pretty good news for him if he played his cards right. As long as she was like this, all the milk for miles would turn sour but luckily for him it also meant he needed only bait the trap and wait. He counted eight heartbeats before she crashed through the only intact window on the cabin, a knife clenched between her teeth.

At short range, Clint considered himself a decent fighter. Even Fury had, a time or two, bequeathed the Nod of Approval in Clint’s direction after the occasional melee fight. Certainly, he was better suited to kill from a distance; no one could work a bow like he could, and he might think of using a rifle as cheating, but he was a damn fine shot with a gun, too.

Natasha, though. Natasha was a close quarters fighter. Getting close to her was like playing with fire, if the fire was a vindictive bastard who liked the sound that bones make when they snap and, not too long ago, placed anguished screaming on par with the dulcet tones of a wind chime choir. Natasha in recovery had been a hoot and a half, but Natasha post-recovery, when she was mostly human, now that was a dangerous proposition—because Natasha-the-fae had nearly forgotten cruelty. Natasha-the-fae killed and tortured and stole because it was ingrained in her nature, and because she didn’t know any better. Natasha-the-mostly-human killed and tortured and stole because vengeance is a purely human trait that she mastered through regular practice. Natasha-the-mostly-human saw violence as a means to an end, but sometimes the end turned out to be the warm glow of satisfaction at a job well done.

She took the knife from her teeth and advanced on him, limping noticeably. “Nat,” he pleaded, backing away, reaching for his own knife on his belt. “Natasha, come on. Remember how hard you worked to get where you are.”

Her eyes gleamed over bright in the dim cabin. Lightning arced outside, followed closely by thunder. She answered him with a lunge and he did his best to knock the knife from her grip and succeeded on the third try, but by then her blade had laid his forearm open. Blood dribbled onto the floor and she came at him with her fists, deceptively small but hard and _mean_. She moved quicker than he ever could, and after two more blows his knife joined hers on the floor with a clatter. The geas in his head wriggled, scratching at the inside of his skull, the command to spare no one branded hot into the darkness behind his eyelids. Natasha, with her limp and too-bright eyes and sluggish trickle of blood at her hairline, gave him a sloppy opening and he took it, using his weight advantage to bring them both to the ground. A clean kill, he lied himself. Natasha, with her busted ankle and sharp teeth sinking into his bleeding forearm to the screaming muscles beneath, moved like a damn eel and before he could stop her she had his sandy hair fisted tightly in her hand. He opened his mouth to protest when stars flashed behind his eyes. Instead he grunted and, taking that as a challenge, she slammed his head against the cabin floor a second time, impossibly harder. His world faded to black. He went still.

Natasha breathed hard through clenched teeth, hissing in the booming silence of the darkened cabin. She touched the little arrow pendant resting against the dip of her collarbone. Silver, because Clint knew how much iron bothered her, and how even tempered steel left a stubborn rash on her skin if left for too long. With trembling hands she pulled Clint into the recovery position—on his side, top knee crooked as a kickstand, bottom arm pillowing his head—and pressed two fingers to his neck. A pulse, steady, strong, alive. She breathed out and brought her fingers to her own neck, the way he had shown her years ago. She was alive, too.

And that would have to be enough.

 

Quicksilver and Scarlett spread pandemonium the only way goblins could. They showed no favoritism—Quicksilver armed and disarmed Lemurs and Avengers indiscriminately while Scarlett spread abject terror and psychosis through their ranks, brushing red magic along the brows of any and all she came across. The Winter Marauder nodded at them in passing and proceeded to the place he would hide the Tesseract. He could not recall his previous forays into the mortal realm—the Goblin King would never allow such indulgence—but he pieced together that hidden treasure never stayed hidden when he was on the prowl. Why else send the Marauder before all others?

He pulled open the hatch and dropped straight down to the next floor, quiet as a cat. He skulked through the gun deck, cutting a sharp salute to the crewmen frantically firing on the Avenger. They nodded at him and got back to work, clearly too busy to bother with someone who _wasn’t_ actively trying to kill them. He strolled in a similar fashion through the powder magazine and dropped down onto the next floor, then the next and the next until he came to the barracks.

The stink of gently used water and unwashed socks assailed him as he padded between creaky cots and hanging hammocks. It was as good as any hiding place. In many ways the barracks were more secure than the treasury or the various artillery holds; this would be the last place to look for a magical artefact, and any crewman caught below deck during working hours could be flogged mercilessly. A captain would never be caught dead in a place like this, preferring to keep to his cabin or out on the deck with the sun and the stars overhead, but Winter gathered that the demigod Loki was not like most captains. True to his prediction, the only warning he received was a subtle shift in air pressure and the whistle of a throwing dagger.

The dagger passed close enough to part the Winter Marauder from several strands of hair. He whirled on his heel, rapier held at the ready in his metal hand and regarded the demigod where he lurked in the shadows.

“At last we might,” Loki grinned. “The gobbling king’s favorite lapdog.”

Winter narrowed his eyes. “I think you’ll find my bite is worse than my bark.”

“No doubt. And don’t you think it queer that you should be sent on this dubious mission at the same time a demigod such as myself acquires the Tesseract?”

“I find many things queer, but never a mission.”

Loki hummed and toyed with a lantern. Even down here they could hear the thunder roll, the ship beneath their feet rocking progressively harder as the storm came to a head. “Did he promise to give you fame? Fortune? No, nothing so trivial as all that. He promised to give you your name, did he not?”

“What would you know about it?” Winter sniffed. His pocket watch weighed heavily in his breast pocket, a steady ticking; he had time, still.

Loki spread his hands, lips curling. “I know that he will never cede to you your own name. I know that he makes grand promises when he intends no one to survive. I know he promised me freedom and power and all kinds of pretty things, but at the end of our negotiations I settled for the life of one man.”

The Winter Marauder frowned. “The fairy realm and this mortal plane will bend to the Goblin King’s word when he receives the Tesseract. All the world hangs in the balance, and you bargain for one man?” His thoughts turned unbidden to the man who knew him, the man possibly (probably) lost to him forever. It made his chest clench and he sneered “Is this _love_?”

Loki gave him a look so sour it could curdle milk. “Love does not happen to the likes of me,” Loki spat. “Call it a debt. I am not in the habit of leaving my debts unpaid, you understand.” He never accrued outstanding dues as far as he could remember, but Winter let himself imagine it. “Not that it matters,” Loki continued, tone bitter. “Unless someone deposes the gobbling king it’s only a matter of time before the Tesseract and the fairy realm with it are his.” He pulled at a board in the wall, revealing a hidey-hole that would have taken the Winter Marauder hours to uncover by himself. Loki reached into the dark crevice and produced the Tesseract wrapped in a bolt of wool cloth. He carefully unfolded the material to show Winter the glowing cube beneath and then, smirking, tossed it underhand. “Catch.”

The cube sailed in as high an arc as it could in the dark little space and Winter did not pause to think, he only acted. He reached his free hand, his unprotected flesh hand, up and caught the cube before it could make contact with the floorboards. He had only a sinking moment of horror before the consequences caught up with him. He screamed.

 

Tony Stark held the wheel steady against the wash of gray, foamy waves that threatened to capsize both the Avenger and the Lemurian Star while Fury defended the bridge with unbridled tenacity.

“How many of these scurvy landlubbers are there!” Tony cried as another Lemur joined the pile of groaning or deceased.

“No one says ‘landlubbers.’”

“Hornswagglers, then. Cackle-fruit-headed hornswagglers.”

Fury scowled and leaned against the doorjamb. His ass kicking foot was tired, as were his ass kicking arms and back and the rest of his ass kicking body. “I’m not even sure those are words, Stark.”

“Arr.”

“Stop that.”

 

 Quicksilver paused to catch his breath by the open drop hatch and so was the first to hear the blood curdling scream. “Winter!” he cried, and dropped through the floor. Scarlett, never far behind, gave her latest assailant a hard kick in the groin and followed him. Startled gunman scurried for the exit and blocked their path but a wave of red magic parted the rushing throng so the twins could safely pass.

They sprinted through the dark, emptying floors until they stepped into the barracks, the air reeking of used water and socks and traces of burnt sulfur. The Winter Marauder lay on his side, curled in a tight ball, gasping, the glowing blue Tesseract sitting on the weathered floorboards a few feet away. It somehow managed to look smug.

Scarlett approached slowly, wincing as abject horror like she had never known before radiated off the Marauder in pungent waves. “Don’t touch it!” he snarled, making both of the witches jump. “Don’t you touch it! Don’t touch it!”

“We won’t!” she assured him, sharper than she intended. Then softer, “No one is going to touch the cube.”

The Winter Marauder stared up at her for a moment, tears leaking down the corners of his eyes, mouth parted as he took in ragged gasps. “It hurts,” he said at last. He looked terribly small like this, the cool efficiency stripped from him in the most brutal of ways. Up until now he always projected a casual kind of confidence, not like he believed that problems happened strictly to other people, but like he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that any trial he came across he could resolve. Like he could step off the ledge of a high place and simply deal with the ground when he got there, gravity be damned. Now, though, he seemed fragile and the shift in responsibility weighed heavy across her shoulders.

Quicksilver found a bolt of wool fabric and used it to gingerly lift the Tesseract from the floor. Even through the cloth it felt warm to the touch, humming very gently and surprisingly heavy, like it was made of gold or lead. His sister pulled Winter to his feet and slung his heavy metal arm across her shoulders. She tried not to look at the blackened scorch marks on his metal hand. She was just about to open the way for them to step back into the fairy realm when her charge shook his head, jaw set. “Not yet,” he rasped.

Quicksilver frowned. “We have what we came here for.”

“ _I said not yet!”_ he snarled.

“Alright! Alright!” Scarlett relented. “What would _you_ have us do next?”

The Winter Marauder glared at the floor for a moment, deep in thought. “We need to get on the Avenger.” He thought of the man who knew him, the man with the shield, and tried not to let the horror strangle him. “We need to regroup. We need Captain Rogers—he’ll know what to do. He’s the man with a plan.”

“That’s suicide!” Quicksilver snapped.

Winter rolled his eyes. “We’re giving the Avengers their stupid toy on a golden platter. Woolen platter. They’ll be open to negotiation.” He straightened up, relieving the red witch of his weight. He swayed only a little. “If not, we’ll use reason and gentle persuasion.” And there was his previous confidence again, peaking through. “Reason,” he explained, waving his right fist, “and gentle persuasion,” he said, waving his left fist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In old timey times, "queer" referred to strange or eery. You can read a double entendre there if you're really committed.
> 
> The Lemurian Star's crewmen are called Lemurs because they're Loki's flying monkeys. And in case you were wondering, Loki's nickname for the Goblin King is a thinly veiled fat joke because he consumes everything from realms to memories. 
> 
> Cackle fruit is allegedly pirate slang for eggs. 
> 
> I love the idea of the Winter Marauder commanding his marks to "Stand and deliver." I know that terminology was more common for highway robberies, but it just fit so well in this chapter. You can learn more [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B2a6l6wM2k).


	4. Don’t You Sail and Don’t You Row (and certainly don’t you swim)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Howard dropped through the hatch. “Rogers, we need to go!”
> 
> “Who the hell is flying the balloon!?”
> 
> Howard looked like hell: blood covered his arms up to the elbows and he inexpertly held a saber in a shaking hand, his clothes were ripped and bloodied, his hair mussed, a bruise beginning to swell one eye shut. He shook his head. “It’s not a problem anymore, Cap. We need to go. Now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TItle for this chapter comes from Voltaire's [The Beast of Pirate's Bay](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcgvLiNYCcA).

Once upon a time there was a prince, the pride of his kingdom, the jewel of the royal family, who shone as bright and golden as the sun. This is not his story.

 

The ocean ceiling rolled, heaving great big gray waves as the storm far above raged. Darcy followed after Jane and Selvig, annoyed. While Darcy kept an eye on the ocean’s surface, her nerd friends chattered excitedly, fiddling with equipment and netting and generally having a good time. Lightning forked in the distance and from this depth even they could hear the booming crack of thunder. “I am not dying in the name of science!” Darcy scolded.

Behind her, Thor chuckled. “I would not let something like lightning harm you, Miss Darcy.”

She squinted at him. “See that you don’t.” Ever since the first raindrops started to fall, Thor had been out of sorts. All day he had been his usual boisterous self and then the storm hit and he got quiet. Like something was wrong but he didn’t yet know enough to say anything.

It made Jane worry, but just by looking at her you wouldn’t know it; Jane believed that the people around her were basically competent the same way that Thor believed people were basically honest. Jane kept her worries to herself and made a show of being engaged with the storm, even if Thor hadn’t been this quiet since the Beginning.

But then they heard the Call, all of them feeling it thrill along their skin, hum through their bones, and Thor tore for the disturbance in the water where the two ships were duking it out. Jane and Darcy followed him, knowing that boats of any kind were dangerous and under the impetus of the Call, well, who knew what could happen.

And then something crashed into the water, a relatively large something even though Darcy pegged the boats as the non-fishing kind, and Thor swam faster. He might have been an alien, but he could cut through water with the best of them. “What is it?” Jane demanded, half a warning and half curious.

“Doctor!” Thor boomed. Selvig sighed and dropped his equipment to see what all the fuss was about. “He needs a doctor! Now!”

 

There was good money to be made for human traffickers. Most of the cargo went into the harbors of the Slave Kingdoms, but a select few got earmarked for more nefarious ends. To make a man a slave, you need only take his freedom and dignity. These poor souls were destined to lose so much more.  

Steve rounded up his team of elite Howlies as soon as Morita caught sight of the slave ship on the horizon from his perch on the crow’s nest. Howard, true to form, elbowed his way into their huddle but at least had the presence of mind to keep his mouth shut until he had something useful to say. “No, they’ll see us from a mile away.” He worried at his mustache, eyes distant. Steve could see the cogs of his brain turning; a horrendous flirt and an incompetent seaman he might be, but no one ever questioned his genius. One does not become Her Ladyship’s prized alchemist and engineer by being anything short of brilliant. Howard snapped his fingers, a familiar salacious smirk curving his lips. “Air ship. We can drop down on them from above, take out the crew and evacuate the cargo.” It was a ballsy strategy, but no one bothered to balk. Death from Above, as Howard insisted they call it, was probably a safer mission than the last three by far.

“What do you mean by ‘we’?” Dugan demanded, looming over Howard. Dum Dum Dugan was a professional loomer, in Steve’s opinion: he was known to loom menacingly over men taller than himself, over men on horseback, over men who weren’t even in the room with Dugan but were talking trash from the next room at dangerous decibels. “ _It’s all in the eyebrows_ ,” Dugan said whenever Steve or Bucky asked him about it, and then he would tug his hat a little lower on his head as if in a show of deference. Asshole. Howard was not a tall man by any means—he stood up straight and spoke loudly and wore thick-soled shoes, but at the end of the day he was not an imposing figure—and Dugan towered over him easily.

Howard huffed. “Well I’m going, ain’t I? You need a pilot, and unless you happened to dig an airship license out of your cereal this morning, that only leaves one candidate.”

“How hard could it be?” Dugan scoffed.

“Steve! Steve, he’s being mean to me!”

“Cap, we can’t be taking the good scientist onboard a mission like this,” Dugan reasoned, pushing his hands in his pockets. “His hands be making machines and tools of the finest caliber, but they sure as sugar ain’t for the butt of a pistol of the haft of a sword.”

Howard sucked in a breath for some kind of harsh rebuttal but Steve cut him off. “Dum Dum, it seems to me we don’t have much choice. No one here is equipped for piloting anything that goes in the air. I mean, I would do it, but I’d only be able to do it once and it would a helluva landing, if you catch my meaning.” The huddle snorted grimly amongst themselves. More than once the Howling Commando needed repairs done to the hull and sails because Steve could be quite _inventive_ with evasive maneuvers.

They attacked in the gray light of a cloudy morning, Howard piloting his airship, a monstrosity of balloons and fire and steel, and the Howlies waiting in the prow of its cabin: Morita silent and somber before battle, Jacques and Gabe speaking softly in Jacques’ mother tongue, Dum Dum cleaning his musket, Dernier cutting the fuses on his weapons of choice, Monty pretending to read from his Good Book, Bucky twirling a blade between his fingers, his thigh pressed alongside Steve’s own while they waited for Howard to get them into position.

And then battle. Musket fire. Cutlasses and sabers and knives and the anguished screams of the dying through the blue haze of smoke that hung over the deck of the slave runner. Bucky and Steve dropped through the hatches to the slave barracks below, Steve using the edge of his shield to break open the locks chaining the would-be slaves in place while Bucky sprinted to the other end of the boat.

“Steve!”

He followed Bucky’s shout and came across the source of his lieutenant’s horror. He would describe the mess of iron bars as a dog cage, but no gods fearing dog owner would keep his animals in such a contraption. Two children curled up in the cage on a bed of dirty straw and stared listlessly up at them, eyes round and terrified in their dirty, bruised faces. Burns and welts marked their arms. Beside them, in a much smaller cage, a dozen pixies hammered at their own iron bars, sending up spark of blue light. The sight made Steve’s gut churn.

The children, he knew, would not be taken to the Slave Kingdoms like their adult counterparts. Instead, they would be taken to a sinkhole, where the veil between the mortal realm and the fairy realm is thinnest, and traded for gold or power. The children would become changelings, twisted and warped until their humanity could be wrested from them, and the pixies, who had likely fled to the human world to escape some calamity in their home, would be turned over to their own oppressors. Bucky’s hand tightened on his knife like he sorely wished to stick it in someone, but he used the blade to jimmy open the children’s cage instead.

The girl blinked up at him, even as the door yawned open. “They say the Devourer will make examples of them,” she rasped.

“Come on,” Bucky urged them. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”

Steve managed to yank the pixies’ cage open and watched the fae swarm free. The children did not move from their tiny prison; Steve was almost sure the little boy was dead already, from the stillness of his skinny body. “Get out! Come on!” Bucky cried, but the girl shook her head even as he reached in to bodily pull her free.

“There is no escaping,” she sighed, and took his left hand in both of her own. Lurid red light arced up his hand, along his wrist, lanced across his forearm and up all the way to his shoulder. His face went white as the bones in that arm shattered with a sickening, muted crunch.

“Bucky!”

They were too late—whatever was left of the girl wasn’t entirely human after the slavers had gotten to her—he grabbed Bucky’s sagging body before it could hit the floorboards and gave the girl up as a lost cause, sprinting pell-mell through the ship to get to the deck. They ran through the emptying slave barracks and Steve half carried, half dragged Bucky up the flimsy ladder to the deck.

Dum Dum’s heavy body careened down to meet them before they could make it, though, and all three crashed to the floor. “Dugan!” Steve choked out, and rolled him off of them. Bucky, until that point had held onto consciousness by a thread, passed out straight away. Dum Dum, on the other hand was less fortunate. A large, clammy, bloody hand gripped the front of Steve’s shirt.

“Cap,” he wheezed wetly.

“No, no, no, no,” Steve muttered. Dugan’s typically pink face took on a gray pallor. “Dugan, stay with me here. I am going to get you out of this, mark my words.”

“Sorry, Cap.” Dugan coughed weakly, sending a fine spatter of blood across Steve’s front. “I did my best. Guess it. Wasn’t enough.”

“No. Dum Dum, I am _ordering_ you to hang in there!” Steve slapped at his graying cheeks.

His eyes drifted shut. “See you ‘round.”

“You motherfucker,” Steve snarled, and shook Dum Dum hard, but when he pressed his fingers to the man’s throat he found no heartbeat. “Wake up, ya lazy fuck!”

Howard dropped through the hatch. “Rogers, we need to go!”

“Who the hell is flying the balloon!?”

Howard looked like hell: blood covered his arms up to the elbows and he inexpertly held a saber in a shaking hand, his clothes were ripped and bloodied, his hair mussed, a bruise beginning to swell one eye shut. He shook his head. “It’s not a problem anymore, Cap. We need to go. Now.”

Howard took Bucky’s leaner weight across his shoulders and ushered Steve, burdened with Dugan’s body, up the rungs first. “Dernier’s in the drink,” he panted as he struggled in Steve’s wake. “Last I saw Gabe he was fighting a black and red blur, fae I assume. And Monty’s not doing good.” He paused on the deck, eyes wild.

Steve cursed under his breath and narrowly missed a fatal musket shot. The iron ball grazed his ribs and kept going, finally coming to rest in Howard’s thigh. He crumpled with a pained shout.

And then the red and black blur came for Steve in the form of a copper-haired woman in a black peasant dress, purple eyes framed by long lashes. She grinned. “Hey sailor.”

“Go!” Howard shouted.

Steve dropped Dugan just in time to dodge the woman’s knife, and raised his shield to fend her off. “Not without you!” he shouted back. From the corner of his eye he could make out Monty falling under a veritable barrage or swords. Howard’s airship monstrosity floated dead on the water. Since when do slave ships have this many armed crewmembers, his brain wondered unhelpfully as the woman fought him and pushed him to the edge of the deck, and still he was losing ground.

Howard laid Bucky on the ground as gently as he could and crawled through the melee, closer to Steve. He pulled something red and vaguely cube-like from his pocket, pulled a string and dropped it into the ocean. Steve kicked the woman away and she flipped through the air, graceful as any acrobat, and over the din of the battle he could make out the hum and whir of something like an airship’s balloons mechanically inflating.

“You’re not going to like this,” Howard said, glib and mild like he had a winning poker hand, and then he seized Steve by the back of his shirt and pulled.

“What—?” But he was just imbalanced enough not to counter Howard’s palm on his chest or the hard push that came with it. Steve tumbled into the sea with an enraged scream.

Howard peered over the edge of the ship. “Only room for one person, see,” he called. Steve hit the water and kicked his way back to the surface just in time to see the woman loom over Howard from behind. “You’re the best of us, Cap!” She gripped the scientist by his hair and hauled him out of view, dismissing Steve without so much as a by your leave. “Look after my boy!” he cried, and then there was silence.

Steve took hold of the red inflatable raft and clambered onto it as the slave ship caught the wind and sailed away. Adrift, he floated there long enough to hear the unmistakable report of execution shots. He waited. Perhaps he waited for rescue, but in the privacy of his own thoughts he knew that he waited for something more final. In a way, he never stopped waiting.

He lay on his back on the raft. The sun rose high in the cloudy sky, weak light filtering through his eyelids until a great shadow cast him into darkness. He opened his eyes.

 

Dark. And cold. Not the biting cold of being thrown headlong into the surf, but a kind of chilliness that comes of drafty rooms in the winter. Steve Rogers lay on his back and waited, perhaps for rescue, perhaps for something more final. He let his eyes drift open.

 

The storm cleared in increments, leaving behind two wrecked ships and endless blue skies. The Avengers counted themselves victorious; Loki disappeared in the fighting, taking with him his geas and the Lemurs happily aligned themselves with Fury, even the Lemurs who never worked for or under him before. Especially the Lemurs who never worked for or under him before. When a one-eyed pirate absolutely covered in the blood of your fallen crewmen brandishes a cutlass at your throat and asks if you want to be on his side or not, the smart answer is to jump on his side like your ass is on fire.

The unknown, unfriendly elements willingly went to the brig for the time being. The Winter Marauder, Scarlett and Quicksilver sat on the single bench behind the bars and waited for their turn to see Fury. The twins fussed with their hair, trying to hide their ears as if to make a good first impression. Winter almost laughed. Not even twenty-four hours among humans and they might as well have round ears and dull teeth again. Young ones adapt so fast.

In the quiet after the rage of the storm and battle, Winter felt like he could hear everything: the twins’ breaths, his own heartbeat, the thready creak of the Avenger on the sea, the ticking of his pocket watch. Presently he reached into his breast pocket—the Avengers stripped them of their weapons, but left him the single trinket—and he depressed the little button on its side. The time was wrong, of course, but that wasn’t why he kept the watch on him. He gazed at the woman’s photo, the steel of her gaze, the fullness of her lips. Carefully, warily, he dug a fingernail between the snug fit of the picture and the watch casing until he could pry the photo free. The twins watched curiously as he clicked the watch shut and replaced it in his waistcoat before daring to flip the picture over, where instead of the nondescript back of a photo was a second picture pasted there.

“Who is that?” Quicksilver asked.

The Winter Marauder’s hands shook. The picture had no color and was faded with age, but he knew that the young man’s hair would be gold and his eyes would be incredibly blue and his smile…his smile… “No one,” Winter grunted. _But he knew me!_ “I met him on a previous mission. It is of no consequence.” The twins didn’t buy that for a minute, but they held their tongues.

With the smoke clearing and the worst of the storm faded away, Tony sneaked onto the deck to take stock of the damage. He squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. It was a mess. Literally, a bloody mess. Damn pirates. Crewmen, Avengers and Lemurs alike, scurried to and fro gathering up their dead comrades for last rites, collecting teeth and severed fingers to be distributed to their respective owners and, gods willing, reattached if possible. Never one to do icky work of that sort, Tony strode to the mainsail like he owned the place—a distinctive kind of swagger he mastered long ago, because it discouraged unwanted questions—and clambered up the swaying rope ladder to the crow’s nest. A good hiding spot, he decided upon clearing the last few rungs; it was high enough for him to be hidden in plain view, but out where he could watch the work being done or stare out at the sea. At least, he thought so until he took hold of the edge of the nest itself and a white and purple feathery thing squawked and cussed him out, nearly sending him tumbling to the deck below.

Bruce sat on the floor of his wrecked cabin lab amidst a chaos of strewn equipment, damp calculations and broken benches. He was wrapped in a shapeless, oversized gray cloak. It was ugly as hell, but very soft on the inside and warm, and it smelled of cedar. He pitied himself until he heard near-silent footfalls stop just outside his broken door.

“Can I come in?”

“If you like,” he rasped. His throat felt like it had been cut raw. Natasha stepped around the door—it hung off its hinges and one hard knock would be all it took to take it the rest of the way down—and she padded over to him. For a moment she hesitated, but decided to drop to the ground opposite him, crossing her legs and resting her hands on her knees. She let Bruce break the silence. “How is he?”

“He’ll live, no thanks to me.”

Bruce let his head thunk against the wall. “Did he give you a choice?” She didn’t answer. He shut his eyes against the world. “You love him.”

“Love is for children, Dr. Banner,” she told him crisply.

He sucked in a breath and exhaled through his nose before bringing his head forward to face her. She seemed distant now, cold and too-still and nothing like she had been just that morning. He leaned over and picked up one of the chunks of pink quartz that had broken off the main chunk in the storm and fighting. The piece was jagged, sharp enough to cut, and he handled it with care. He cupped it in his palm and gently dropped it on the bit of floor separating them. “You seemed interested in it before it got broken. Maybe you’ll still want it after?”

She didn’t crack a smile, but she did pinch the shard of quartz between index finger and thumb. She looked at it hungrily, like she didn’t really want the quartz itself but she wanted to walk away with it anyway. “Being broken doesn’t diminish its worth,” she said slowly, feeling out the words as they came to her. She shifted, and winced when some of her weight pressed against her bad ankle.

“Do you want me to take a look at that?” Bruce offered. How he must look, offering medical advice while wrapped in nothing but a big cloak, hair wild, spectacles nowhere to be found. He offered her a self-deprecating smile. “I’m better than nothing.”

Her mouth twitched like she wanted to laugh but couldn’t. Not yet. “You’re a far cry from nothing, doctor.”

 

“So what are we going to do with him?”

“Look, Thor, we can’t keep him as some kind of pet. He belongs with his own kind.”

Steve blinked up at the low stone ceiling, letting the words filter through his consciousness one at a time. Ah, they must mean him. That would make sense.

The room was dark and cool, which suited him fine because he felt like he had been hit by a train. His head throbbed and every muscle in his body ached, making his whole body feel impossibly heavy. He lifted a hand and stirred the air but let his arm fall back limp against his rough, hard bed. Cot? His eyes shut and allowed himself to drift.

 

“You claim you know Captain Rogers?” She had red hair and a pronounced limp despite the crisp gauze holding a medically sanctioned splint in place over her ankle.

“Natalia,” Winter breathed in spite of himself. She stilled her uneasy prowl and watched him, her face carefully blank.

“I haven’t gone by that name in some time. That shouldn’t be a name in your head, Marauder.”

How could he forget her? She burned like a flame in his mind, all-consuming and all the brighter for the transience of their acquaintanceship.  “You’ve grown,” he blurted out, because she seemed to be waiting for an answer but he couldn’t sort through the jumble of memory to give her a sensible response.

“Amazing what happens when you become human. Well, mostly human.”

“You have fun when time flies.” That wasn’t the idiom he was looking for, but the sentiment seemed to fit well enough. “Where is Ste—Captain Rogers?”

She shrugged. “Around, I assume. We’re still recuperating from battle. And don’t think I didn’t notice you and your little buddies ‘helping.’”

Before Quicksilver could make some fool comment, Winter interjected “They work under me. And I need to parley with Rogers, the sooner the better.”

 

“Were you able to stall them?” Fury asked when Natasha reappeared in his office. The woman walked like a cat, quiet enough that you could still fail to notice her even if she moved directly into your line of sight.

“The Winter Marauder is a bit addled, but he’s not going to drop Steve. It’s the one thing he comes back to time and time again.”

Fury sighed and toed at the blood stain on the floor. “How long do you think the brig can hold them?”

“Well, it’s mostly iron. Good thick bars, solid hinges. I give us an hour before they either magic themselves free or Winter pulls one of his daring escapes. Has anyone been able to find Rogers?”

He shook his head. “He’s not up and moving around, that’s for sure. But we can’t find a body, either.”

“Could he have…fallen? Overboard?”

“Anything is possible,” Fury muttered darkly. “How do you think our favorite ghost story is going to react when the man he desperately wants to meet with is a no-show?”

“We have to keep looking.”

 

For as long as he could remember, Steve Rogers loved the ocean. If pressed, he would concede that the sea was his first love. He spent many a summer in his youth loitering by the docks or sitting on the boardwalk, legs dangling over the railing, staring out over the horizon with soulful eyes. At home with his sainted mother, he spoke the Old Tongue. Out and about, he spoke Common. But by the docks he learned a few key phrases in Psileshei. He picked up loanwords from Framcr, Goarek, Longtooth. But mostly he learned the language of seamen everywhere: emphatic cussing. And if within earshot of his sainted mother he slipped from the Old Tongue to Emphatic Cussin’, he learned that some things are better left unsaid. (Such lessons were regularly punctuated with bars of soap clamped between his teeth to ensure wholesome learning.)

When he turned sixteen he applied to work on the docks, and though he was too scrawny and sickly to load and unload the boats, his wit and knowledge of sums landed him a place in the office. He added figures, summarized reports and did the general running around.

And he met Bucky.

For some time he mistook the brief but bright flare of admiration for one James Buchanan Barnes as a kind of covetousness. Bucky could work the docks like a _real man_ ; he was strong and, as his ma would say, well-built. He had a good smile, a reputation as a good man if prone to lasciviousness. He was glib and clever in his way, turning a barbed tongue to the fools on his crew but took care to show Steve kindness in their few interactions. Naturally, Steve wanted to be like Bucky. He called it covetousness. Envy.

“Rogers, isn’t it?”

Steve paused his work and lifted his pen from the page to keep excess ink from bleeding through. Bucky leaned in the office doorway, disheveled from unloading crates, arms crossed loosely across his chest. “Ah, yes. ‘Twould be me.”

Bucky smirked like he knew something Steve didn’t. “I have myself a situation, Rogers. See, I asked a lovely lady to go dancing with me, but wouldn’t you know it? She has a sister who would be chaperoning her.”

Steve blinked. “Is that a fact?”

“Oh yes. And I says to myself, I says ‘Bucky, what you need is a date for her chaperone. So that no one is left out and I can steal my lovely lady away for a little bit.’ And I wonder to myself, I wonder ‘Who would fit the bill? Gotta be a good gods-fearing man, not too old, not too dumb, who would know a thing or two about discretion.’ And I come to realize the answer hands me my paycheck every week. So what do you think?”

Steve leaned his elbow against the desk, inadvertently smudging a line of sums but amused nevertheless. “Are you asking me on a terrible double date, Barnes?”

Bucky doffed his cap and dropped onto one knee. “Steven Rogers. Would you make me the happiest man alive and keep my date’s chaperone occupied?” There was good humor there, edged in mischief, but something in Steve’s mind slotted into place. _Uh oh._

He smirked back at Bucky even as his gut clenched. This wasn’t covetousness, he realized. “James Barnes, it would be my pleasure.” He even placed his hand over his heart and threw his head back as he said it because this was a Fun Game. Bucky was a Fun Guy. This was a steaming load of Fun. It meant nothing.

Bucky’s lovely lady and her chaperone never arrived for the date, but Bucky didn’t seem too preoccupied by that small detail. “Probably for the best,” he said from where he helped Steve hold up the wall at the dancehall. He sipped his rum and passed the tumbler to Steve, who wrinkled his nose.

“There’s sawdust floating in it.”

“Means it’s fresh,” Bucky shrugged. “Free fiber.”

Steve took a tentative sip and kept it down, but barely. “That’s awful.” Bucky sniggered and checked his pocket watch, a round, gold thing about fifteen years out of fashion—probably his father’s. Steve did not ask. They finished the glass of rum and then hit the streets, looking for adventure and more (cheaper) rum. Mostly rum.

There were more double dates. Always different women, though they seemed more invested in each other than in Bucky and Steve. Mostly, though, Bucky got stood up. And he never seemed troubled by that. “More for us!” he would say as they dug into a meal meant for four, or popped open a cheap bottle of wine meant for four. Sometimes the food would be too rich, the wine too strong, and Bucky would escort Steve home and sleep over in lieu of walking to his own apartment. Sometimes they would share a nest of cushions and blankets on the living room floor. And sometimes the food was not too rich, the wine not too strong, and Bucky would escort Steve home and they would share a nest of cushions and blankets.

They argued on a constant basis. Steve had a big mouth and tiny fists. Bucky never washed his dishes, leaving them in the sink for Steve to scold him over. Money was always tight. Steve mourned the passing of his sainted mother by changing careers twelve days after the funeral.

Some fights are best forgotten, but Steve remembered that blowup in excruciating detail. The following day he boarded his ship, the Lehigh, and would not see Bucky again for six months. Six very long months.  

He learned more in those six months than the rest of his life combined. He learned how to fight like a woman instead of like a Bucky and actually managed to survive a few scraps that would have killed him otherwise. He learned how to tell a captain from a figurehead; Phillips had the final say so on everything, but he left most of the executive decisions with his first mate. He learned that evil, true evil, walks around in weathered boots like everyone else, smiles and laughs like everyone else, misses home like everyone else. He learned the depths of human depravity more intimately than he wanted to. He learned that he was an idiot.

“I thought you were smaller.”

“I joined the privateers.”

Blue smoke hung on the air in the tavern. Only a handful of patrons occupied the place, nursing tepid beer and speaking in low voices. Bucky’s eyes looked harder than Steve remembered them. Flintier. Colder. His jaw worked while he stared up at Steve. He bought Bucky a drink, sat him at the bar, and they talked. They argued and Bucky scolded him and their friendship, what was left of it, should have died because Steve left. Steve up and walked out on Bucky, abandoned him (and Steve wouldn’t ask about his father or the round pocket watch now seventeen years out of fashion) and some things toe the line of unforgiveable. Steve refilled his glass. It took three refills before Bucky ran out of steam, red eyed and sallow and not quite drunk enough for belligerence but another drink was definitely in his future, pal.

Steve took a handkerchief from his pocket: white silk linen with dark blue lace along its edges. It was crisply folded in his hand, heavy with weight that existed in the mind instead of in the material, and he pressed it into Bucky’s hand.

“The hell’s this, then?” he grumbled. He unfolded the silk, stared at the gold ring there, refolded the silk over the ring and dropped it on the bar. “The hell is this then!?” he snapped.

Steve refilled his glass. “A token from Her Ladyship. I’m being reassigned to the Howling Commando. High risk privateering. We’ll be dealing mostly in slave trade vessels, pirates, fairy profiteering. Dangerous stuff.” He gestured at the crisp white square. “The handkerchief alone is worth a month’s rent. The ring you can do whatever you want with.”

“So this is it.” The tension drained from Bucky’s shoulders and he stared at the handkerchief where it sat so innocuously before him. “This is just…goodbye.”

“No. Come with me.”

“What?”

“This is an advance. Come with me. Didn’t we always say we’d travel the world one day? This is our chance!”

“This is the most gobsmackingly terrible idea you have ever had!”

“Buck,” Steve murmured. He dropped his voice and leaned forward, resting a hand on Bucky’s knee. “Men are losing their lives out there every day. I have no right to do less than them. What I did to you was wrong. There is no getting around that. I was gone for six months and I knew by day two that I made a shitty decision. But if I learned anything on the Lehigh it’s that home isn’t a house and it isn’t a hot meal and it isn’t a boat.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that you have a gold ring and a bunk with your name on it. I’m saying that in the six months I was gone I was seasick during the worst of the squalls and I kept thinking about how I wanted to share that with you.”

“Gross.”

“And while I was swabbing the deck on the hottest days I was thinking about how much I wished I could talk you into doing it.”

“You think you’re funny but you’re not.”

“And every time I chewed through hardtack or bit into a lemon I thought of your ugly mug.”

“You can stop now.”

Steve’s face softened into something more sincere. “And you were in my thoughts for every sunrise and every sunset, and when the sea was choppy and gray with the weather, and when the light would catch the sails just so, and when the stars were so clear and close I could almost touch them. What I’m asking for isn’t safe. It isn’t glamorous or romantic or anything like what you find in the dime store novels. I have no right to ask anything of you. But I could never live with myself if I didn’t.”

The other patrons in the tavern looked conspicuously elsewhere and listened very closely to this whole exchange, but forsook all pretenses when Steve stood up from his stool and dropped to one knee. “James Barnes.”

“You might actually be the biggest sap I ever had the misfortune to meet.”

Steve grinned and doffed his cap. “Will you make me the happiest man on earth and travel the seas with me, meeting new people, and killing them?”

Bucky glowered and finished his drink. He set the glass on the bar with a thud and smirked. Steve forgot how much he missed that smirk. Bucky placed a hand over his heart and tossed his head back, proclaiming “Only if I get to wear your hat!”

 

It is said that when choosing between two loves, choose the second one, as the second one was lovely enough to turn your eyes from the first. Steve Rogers could have been happy if he loved only the sea. He could have lived his life on the Avenger or any number of boats that came after the Howling Commando. He could have made his fortune as a privateer, doing real, tangible good in the world. For as long as he could remember, Steve Rogers loved the sea. This is not that story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Johnny Depp is credited with the quote "If you love two people at the same time, choose the second. Because if you really loved the first one, you wouldn't have fallen for the second." 
> 
> It's not clear here, but Selvig is totally a selkie.
> 
> I just really love using Howard Stark as a source of manpain. And his last words being about his son just...I need a moment...I'm just gonna sit down for a little while. Loved writing that part. 
> 
> To be honest, I ship Bruce and Natasha not at all. That is a ship that came totally out of left field in AoU. And then I wrote this and I really like the chemistry happening between Nat and Bruce, how they can bond over being broken in ways the other Avengers aren't, how they can empathise with being monsters and even go through a hulk out/relapse together. I didn't really get a good feel for the chemistry in AoU, so I guess this is my fix-it. I hope you like it, dear reader.
> 
> Feel free to comment on here or you can visit my [tumblr](http://moontyrant.tumblr.com/).


	5. Devils for Liars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “A mermaid’s kiss can prevent drowning,” Jane continued, somehow making a kiss sound clinical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some real blood, sweat and tears in this chapter.  
> The title comes from Voltaire's "They Know Me Here." You can listen to the song [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cogk_2E6hDQ). 
> 
> Warning: some violence and tragic backstory.

“He’s slept long enough!”

“Darcy! Stop it!”

“Wake up Mister Man! You been a-sleepin’ for seventy years!”

Steve startled awake with a voiceless squawk and would have leapt to his feet if his body were up to taking orders from his brain. As it was, he managed to flop off the hard cot and flailed for a moment on the cold, rough floor. The cause of his rude awakening was a woman…of sorts. From the waist up she was a woman; from the waist down, however, she was all gleaming scales and sinew and fins that looked as delicate as rose petals. Her long dark hair was braided loosely over her shoulder. Steve had seen artists’ renderings of mermaids before, and they all gave their subjects clam shell brassieres, tastefully placed seaweed, lank hair that fell over the chest area. This mermaid didn’t go in for any of that. The only thing she wore was a necklace of twisted rope threaded through all manner of teeth and small bones.

Of course, fishermen and pirates were known to come across mermaids every once in a great while. That is, sometimes a boat would wander off the metaphorical beaten path and never be seen again. Oceanographers made a living off knowing about mermaids’ migratory patterns and publishing the results in marinas and harbors. It didn’t do to drop netting near a mermaid settlement.

Like most fears, the fear of mermaids was contagious and quick to take hold. Steve himself gave any and all known mermaid hunting grounds and nesting sites a wide berth and, looking upon one in the flesh, he suspected he should have allowed for a wider margin. Its skin glowed pale green. Its teeth were sharp like a shark’s, eyes big and round and dark, nails long and curved into talons. She grinned wide and toothy and when she spoke her voice carried strange harmonics, the kind of harmonics that could lure an unwary sailor to a watery grave, the kind of harmonics that wheedled through the skull and made a nest in one’s higher faculties, the kind of harmonics that didn’t match what she said at all. “He’s fine! He’s awake and everything!”

“Because you yelled!” A second mermaid drifted into the dim alcove. Like the first, her chestnut hair was loosely braided and her skin glowed a soft green-gold. Unlike the first, she wore three necklaces of varying lengths, all heavy with teeth and small bones. “Don’t mind Darcy,” she said, and Steve took a moment to parse the simple command into a Common he could understand.  

 _Where am I?_ he tried to say, but when he spoke only silence escaped his treacherous throat. He tried again but with the same result. The more golden of the two mermaids gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, but you have no voice down here. Land mammals need air to pass through their vocal cords to produce sound and, well, we’re in short supply of air here. My name is Jane, and this is Darcy.”

“We saved your life. You’re welcome,” Darcy beamed.

Steve made a wild gesture meant to express the tenuous gravity of his situation. Were he allowed a voice, he might have asked _Where am I?_ and _How did I get here?_ and _How am I not dead?_ and _Where is the Avenger? Did we win? How many ships must I lose before death takes me permanently?_ Of course, his desperate flailing conveyed none of that.

“Riiiiiight,” Jane said slowly. “It’s like this: we were chasing a storm—Thor thinks it was artificially made but I wasn’t able to get any useful data before it dispersed—and we came across a pair of ships fighting when something—you—hit the water and sent the Call. Thor got to you first, and we were able to get you stabilized.”

“I helped,” Darcy leered.

“A mermaid’s kiss can prevent drowning,” Jane continued, somehow making a kiss sound clinical.

“Yes it can.”

“Of course, Darcy was a bit more enthusiastic than strictly necessary.”

“You’re not supposed to stop giving mouth-to-mouth until the victim regains consciousness.” Steve could feel a blush in the making, but it never crept up his neck, as if unable to survive the chilly water outside his skin. He settled for hiding his face in his hands.

“There’s a line you’re not supposed to cross, Darcy,” Jane sighed. She rounded on Steve, hands on her waist (mermaids, contrary to what most artists on the subject think, do not have hips). “Thor answered the call and it seemed to mean something to him, but he’s not sharing. So you’re going to be his responsibility.” Steve nodded slowly. He felt like a small child being passed from one relative to the next.

“Just a head’s up, the guy’s pretty intense,” Darcy warned. “He’s a little much to take in all at once. Good kisser, though.”

Jane shuddered. “Darcy kisses literally anyone that falls in the water.”

“Are you saying I have low standards, Doc?”

“All I’m saying is that _technically_ speaking all your exploits are homeless as soon as they hit the ocean—“

“Oh here we go!”

“And putting your mouth on strange hobos is no way to lead a responsible life.”

Steve never considered himself homeless, or a hobo for that matter. He watched the two mermaids bicker on their way out of the dim little alcove and shook his head. He hefted himself onto the stone shelf he mistook for a cot and let the aches of his body fade into the background.

 

 

These are the things Scarlett did not remember.

She did not remember being a promising witch from an early age. She did not remember the smell of orange peels drying on the windowsill, or acorns hung by the entryway, or the treasure trove of hag stones kept in a wicker basket and left on dew-damp grass during full moons. She did not remember when the slavers came to their village, or the fire that swallowed the houses, the screams of her mother, or the way her father fought and spilt blood across the dew damp grass. She did not remember her father.

Her father…

But perhaps that is a story best left to another teller.

She did not remember when the slavers came for her and her brother, bundled them up, threw them in a cage unfit for the lowliest of mongrels, starved them and beat them. It is said that women and girls are stronger than their male counterparts—infant girls will consistently outlive a sickness that kills their infant brothers nine times out of ten. Scarlett did not remember how this knowledge ate away at her as she saw her brother, so bright and exuberant, shrivel into himself. She did not remember watching the light leave his eyes, a little to a time until he stared back at her, unblinking, lips parted.

She did not remember when she first met the Winter Marauder. He went by a different name in that place and time. She did not remember taking his hand, so warm and rough and alive under her fingers, thrumming with red needful magic, nor could she recall the way the idea clicked. His arm made a dreadful sound in her ears, but dreadful things happen every day (her mother screamed and screamed and _screamed_ ) and he wouldn’t even miss it, really.

She was just borrowing. She couldn’t borrow time—she didn’t know how, just yet—but she could borrow something less precious and, as the two privateers sprinted for either safety or death, she funneled some of the stolen ( _borrowed!_ ) life force into her brother. She did not remember when her brother blinked after too long staring. She did not remember pulling the cage door safely closed, to protect her and her ailing brother from the savagery of men.

These are the things Scarlett did not remember. Perhaps that is for the best.

 

 

Feet clambering down to the lower levels, towards the brig, caught the Marauder’s attention. “Look alive,” he grunted, rousing Scarlett and Silver from their shallow sleep. A kid scurried into view, his arms heavy with complicated machinery with a bespectacled older man on his heels. This was what Winter gathered from the kid: he was up to no good, very possibly mad, and he looked like…like…

And the man on the kid‘s heels, upon a second glance, was not as old as he carried himself. He walked stiffly, torso held in a perpetual cringe, an uncertain smile tugging tightly at his lips. _A dog that smiles is either a happy dog or about to snap._ Winter blinked the thought away, another half-baked memory from another ghost he couldn’t name.

The kid beamed at him through the bars. “Still getting your little tête-à-tête with the good captain together, so I thought I’d look at that arm for a little bitty bit.”

Winter frowned. “I am functional,” he said, and flexed his fingers. Granted, something clicked unhealthily and his pinky finger on that side seemed a shade too stiff for comfort, but he didn't need medical attention.

“I can see that, but this is more for me than for you. I’ve never seen anything like it—even the highest end prosthetics look more like hooks than hands.” He made grabby hands at the bars separating them. “So gimme gimme gimme!” He grinned so wide, a winsome face not yet dark with beard and in the light he looked like…he looked like… “This way! Your friends can just hang tight for the time being.”

The kid pulled the door open and Winter followed him down the ship a little ways. He expected doors to slam and locks to click in their wake, but neither of his escorts bothered. If he came to harm, Scarlett and Silver would hear; maybe the iron bars would hold them, but maybe not. The kid kept up a steady stream of chatter the whole time until they stopped in front of a large metal something and he dropped a heavy toolbox on a work bench. “Ever been to the High Mountains? They like polished steel and bronze there, it’s a whole aesthetic. Elaborate as all get out. Someone told me once that a few ambassadors spent a season on Asgard and brought back some stylish flair. O’ course, you wouldn’t catch me dead in a leather tunic and gold lamé pants.”

The Winter Marauder took a seat on a proffered stool and faced the big metal thing. The room’s lighting was poor—somehow darker than the brig—so he could not make out the specifics of the machine before him. “Yeah,” the kid grumbled to himself, pulling out a gas lamp for the bespectacled man to place on a table on the far side of the room. “Okay, feed your metal arm through this doohickey here.” Dubious, Winter did as he was told. He was among friends, or at least people Steve trusted. Where was Steve? Winter rested his hand flat on a shelf on the big metal thing and the kid turned a wheel until two plates fitted over his metal wrist, holding him secure as in a vise.

“Does it have sensation?”

The silence pulled Winter from his reverie and he turned again to look at the kid who looked like a friend made in a dream and forgotten upon waking. “Pardon?”

“Your arm. Can you feel it at all?”

The man in the doorway watched them. He was no guard, not with glasses and a tight not-smile, but he watched the Marauder closely. Winter looked back at the kid. His head hurt. “It doesn’t feel.”

“You seem really good with it.” The kid took a light-making machine from his tool box, used a lever to wind it up and then set it on the work bench beside him so he could see what he was doing.

“It is my arm.” But that wasn’t especially true, was it? “I have had it for as long as I can remember.”

The kid flipped open one of the ubiquitous plates and Winter turned away, the sight of wires and screws beneath disquieting to him. “I’m Tony, by the way.”

“I know,” he replied before he could stop himself.

 

Steve fell into an uneasy doze, as is the wont of those recovering from a near-fatal encounter, when Thor stormed into the alcove. Giving Thor a quick if frantic once over, he could see that this mermaid was not like the others. For one, he was male. Naturally, about half of mermaids anywhere must be male (even if artists seem a bit murky on the subject) but Steve never imagined a mermaid—male or not—with such a beard. While Darcy and Jane were mostly green, Thor was gold: pale skin with a hint of gold tinged evenly throughout, yellow hair and beard, vibrantly gold scales down his tail with red-gold fins. He wore a necklace of twisted rope heavy with teeth and small bones with the addition of a round, red glass bead and a silver coin—human things. But what last drew Steve’s eye seemed the most perplexing: Thor had hips. Not prominent hips, mind you, but _human_ hips that flared just a little from his waist and then narrowed into a tail.

“Ah, hello fellow!” Thor boomed. Steve blinked and Thor pushed a wax tablet into his hands with a slender stone stylus. “I am glad you are well! Pray, how should I address you?” Steve blinked again and scratched his name into the tablet. Thor’s voice sounded big and real and almost tinny in the water, without the harmonics so troubling in Jane and Darcy’s voices.

“Steve Rogers, captain. I regret you were so rudely ejected from your vessel, friend Steve.”

Steve nodded slowly. Darcy was right; Thor was a bit…much. “I hope it was not purely Loki’s doing, though I am glad of the Call.”

Steve rubbed his palm across the wax until the tablet was mostly smooth again and scratched in the next question he needed addressed. _Call?_

“I see the ways of mermaids are still strange to the ways of men.” Thor sank onto the shelf and for the first time Steve realized how _big_ he was. Not just tall, er, long—though he would easily dwarf Steve if they stood toe-to-tail—but broad. His biceps were bigger than Steve’s whole head! He folded his hands—as big as dinner plates!—and fixed Steve with the kind of unarming smile that would make even Her Ladyship smile back. “The Call is as mysterious as it is needful. It is said that a shark can smell a single drop of blood in the water from miles away. So too can mermaid folk. Unlike our brothers the sharks, we can sense the intent of the blood—fear from those who fall unwillingly into the sea, desperation from those who wish to draw a mermaid or selkie to make a deal, pain for those who fall victim to the dangers in the waters, longing for those who wish to meet friends they made upon a storm. Perhaps it is magic, or biology, or lore made flesh, but mermaids know the call and they answer it. We always answer it.” He tapped a finger to Steve’s sternum. “The Call from those we’ve met before is strong, but the strongest of all is the Call from those we love.” Steve made a face and inched away, making Thor give a booming, tinny laugh. “You fell into the water wearing your own blood, it is true, but you also wore the blood of my brother.” His smile did not change, but something in his eyes made it look unbearably sad. “I hoped that in the absence of my influence, my brother Loki…I hoped he might have learned to be kinder.”

Steve stared at his wax tablet, but could only think of the blood rushing through his ears, and the itch under his earlobes. He reached an absent hand to rub there only to find Thor’s huge fingers wrapped firmly around his wrist. “Ah, I know that must be uncomfortable, but best not to touch those.” Seeing his bewilderment, Thor went on, “The new gills. They form as soon as a mermaid administers her kiss and they can itch for some time.”

_You would know firsthand?_

Thor answered before Steve even finished writing. “There was a tremendous storm when I…when I fell into the surf,” he explained. “I believe ‘twas Darcy who saved me that time as well, though I fear I fainted straight away, so the whole experience is indistinct in my memory.” Not indistinct enough, from the way Thor shuddered and worried at his beard.

Steve bent over his tablet again. _You can talk underwater._

His booming laugh once again filled the small alcove. “Fortunate for me, I am not a man as you are! I am Aesir, from the springtime realm of Asgard! I am not mortal, and it does not shame me to say there is more than a few mermaids in my ancestry, and more Aesir blood among the mermaids than is polite to mention in detail.”

Steve was already scratching into the wax. _What about my ship?_

“It sailed away, which I am certain is bittersweet news indeed.” Steve nodded. As long as the Avenger could still float well enough to sail, he could always catch up with it later. He could bang out the logistics later, when his head didn’t ache and his…his _gills_ troubled him less. Thor gave him a few pats on the back he meant to be sympathetic but actually almost knocked him clear off the shelf. “Captain,” he murmured, and those big blue eyes were so damn sad that Steve almost tried to pat him on the back, “you fell into the water with my brother’s blood in your teeth. Tell me, what news does this grave omen bring?”

Steve wrote in quick fragments as the story came to him and let Thor piece it together out loud. There was the Tesseract, how Fury needed it for ubiquitous but vague _reasons_ , how Loki had taken it and made the crew of the Lemurian Star his minions, Steve’s brief fight with a ghost from his past, the two fae, perhaps goblins, he saw milling about causing trouble, his brief battle with Loki.

“That is a terrible tale of woe,” Thor remarked at last. “But I suspect I know the creature behind this. The only being powerful enough to take a man’s memory and wage such an insidious affront against reality and unreality both would be none other than the Goblin King himself.”

_Goblin King._

“Verily,” Thor sighed. “No one knows his true name, for names in the fairy realms hold great power. He alone would be able to turn Loki to his will.” He rubbed a hand over his eyes, a sad smile twisting his mouth. “Loki is a great mischief maker. My father used to say that he could either rule over Asgard or curb my brother’s behavior; he could not possibly do both.”

Steve rubbed at the dagger wound he received by Loki’s hand. _I believe it_ , he thought to himself.

Thor shook his head. “Traditional mortal weaponry cannot possibly save your world from the evil king’s wiles. I will accompany you to retrieve…my...my father’s war hammer. Perhaps it will be enough.”

 

Bruce, as he came to know him, did not say much. Tony tinkered with Winter’s arm, his wrist secure in the vise—“The last thing I want is you to move and I mess up something that makes that whole side of your body useless. It’s a deep dark fear of mine and I met you ten minutes ago, so put on your patient pants and bear with me, okay? Okay.”

Natalia—Natasha now—visited them with a gift of pickles and hardtack and she lingered for some time to watch Tony work and tease them. Winter only half listened. His Natalia, a woman already. She blossomed on the human plane like a springtime bloom, lovely as a rose, sweet as hemlock. “A nice little dog and pony show, though,” Tony snickered. “With extra dog, hold the pony.”

“Thanks, Stark,” Bruce sighed with a roll of his eyes.

“Subtlety is not a strong suit for the House of Stark,” Natasha smiled.

“But what I wanna know is what you’re going to go by when you’re all…you know.”

“When I’m all wolfed out, you mean,” Bruce supplied. He looked a man who would very much like to not talk about this, but couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse to leave the room.

“The _Other Guy_ sounds like you’ve been cuckolded.”

Natasha laughed into her hands and waved away Bruce’s scowl. “What to call a man that becomes a hulking wolf?”

“Hulk?” Tony offered.

Bruce shook his head. “Pass. I don’t need a nickname, guys.”

“The _Incredible_ Hulk?” Tony waggled his eyebrows like a man giving Bruce an offer he couldn’t refuse. Natasha’s face lit up.

“No! What about Scruffles?”

“Scruffles?” Bruce choked out.

“Scruffles, destroyer of worlds, devourer of kittens,” Tony added.

“No!”

“Fido the Peacekeeper.”

“Fang.”

“Maxwell Shoe-eater.”

“Why am I friends with you two?” Bruce laughed, and then blushed brightly enough that even in the wan light of the gas lamp Winter saw it. He didn’t take back those words, though. There was something sly in Natasha’s smile now, but she just shook her head and patted Bruce’s shoulder.

“Because friendship is the real treasure on these seas, Scruffles.”

“Ugh, gag!” Tony hooted. “Get a room.” He flipped the last plate down and leaned back, rolling his shoulders to work out the stiffness there. “Think we’re done here, Frosty.”

“Now I’m getting nicknames?” he balked. Tony grinned in a way that would be rakish in about four years but just looked annoying on his boyish face. He set his tools back in his toolbox and turned the wheel when the big metal vise made an ominous clunking noise deep in its gears. Winter tensed. “What was that?”

 

In the brig some way a ways down the ship, Quicksilver and Scarlett waited. Silver closed his eyes and leaned against the cold wall, head tipped back, and tuned out his sister’s restless fidgeting. Time passed. He could feel it in a visceral way, and something told him that he wouldn’t be so aware of time were he not a student of the Goblin King. Had he lived a true childhood here, on the human plane, he might have regarded time as ubiquitous, in the same way fish regard water. Of course, a fish taken from the sea will flounder and struggle and gasp. He wondered what his fate held in store when the Goblin King summoned him home.

And he would summon Silver home.

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes and let time pass. Even now he could feel dregs, tendrils of loose time drifting past his senses. For his sister, time travelled immeasurably slow, heavy with boredom and anticipation. For the crewmen above deck, time moved quickly; they did what they needed to do, one task after another, this and this and this. If Quicksilver slowed his breath and strained his ears he could make out heartbeats, steady drums that beat out the rhythm of the universe, pacing out time so that things didn’t happen all at once. Underneath it all, if he walked the line between waking and sleeping without losing himself, Silver could hear one heartbeat bigger than the rest. This last thudded slower, deeper, not in time with crashing waves but pacing out the high tide and the low tide. A single beat could last hours, with hours of rest in between.

Time travelled, not like a particle or a wave, but like a train of thought—never ceasing, slowed but never truly stopped, errant and erratic but with a sense of purpose through its twists and turns. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes and let tendrils of time break across his consciousness. He could almost gather the dregs in his hands, fold them tight and keep them in his pocket for a rainy day.

Something on the air stirred. Silver got to his feet and shook his head against a dizzy spell. “What’s going on!” he yelled at the open doorway.

“Nothing!” the boy, Stark, wailed.

“I’m fucking stuck!” Winter yelled back.

“It’s fine! Totally fine! Have him out in a jiff!”

Red magic crackled and curled along Silver’s peripheral vision. “We are betrayed,” Scarlett growled, getting to her feet. “I know not where this Captain Rogers is, but Fury has taken the Tesseract and now he will dispose of us.”

Quicksilver grimaced. He didn’t want to believe it, but the evidence before him was plain enough. “What do you suggest?”

“Stay out of my way,” she answered, and glared at the wooden planking of the walls until they splintered.

 

The sounds of distressed lumber filtered into the little examination room. “They’re breaking my boat!” Tony wailed.

Bruce fiddled in one of the machine’s compartments, brow furrowed. “Focus, Tony. I’m a doctor—not an engineer.”

“If those two idiots sink us I’m going to tan their hides,” Winter growled, more for his benefit than theirs.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” Natasha assured him from where she leaned against the wall.

“Shouldn’t you be doing something useful, like saving my ship! Or getting this homicidal maniac free?”

Natasha gave Tony such a scathing look he actually looked abashed. “I’m a pirate and a spy besides. What do you want me to do? Swashbuckle him free? Use political discourse to get the vise open? Tell me, Stark, I’m dying to know.”

“Well you don’t need to be mean about it,” Stark huffed.

“This is stupid,” the Winter Marauder snapped, though his words were nearly drowned out by a particularly loud crack a little ways down the ship. He wriggled and yanked hard.

“I wouldn’t do that…” Bruce said and then there was an ominous creak, followed by a pop.

“Riiight,” Tony said, drawing the syllable out for a beat too long. “I’m just not going to deal with that,” and he fainted straight away.

Winter schooled his face. He also wasn’t going to deal with this newest development in any meaningful capacity, but he felt he was being a bit more proactive about it. “Gross, the fingers are still wiggling,” Natasha grimaced. Winter swallowed back the bile that threatened to come up and stood up, albeit more shakily than he cared for.

“I’ll worry about that later.” Much later. He went to run a hand through his hair, used the wrong arm and succeeded in bonking his bald wrist against his head. “Okay. This is fine. Let’s go save the day.”

 

Labari spent an improbable amount of time preening her feathers. Mostly she liked to use personal hygiene as an excuse to eavesdrop, but today she was using it to keep an eye on the Avenger from her perch on the crow’s nest. There was some unrest by the drop hatch, but what caught her eye was a burbling on the sea. Curious, she pulled her beak over her primaries for another couple passes and then took wing, swooping low enough to see.

She circled a couple times just to make sure, but her eyes played no tricks on her today. A pair of mermaids cut through the water, only a couple feet below the surface. One was a mermaid with legs, even. Which is like a man, but with astounding breath control/interesting features in the gill area. She circled overhead, safely out of reach, and watched the leggy mermaid approach the Avenger, tread water for a minute or two, and then launch himself onto the deck. Granted, it looked like he had some help from the second mermaid, a specimen easily twice his size. Still, Labari counted the breach as one of the most graceful she ever saw. He arced through the air, twisted, seemed to realize he was going to land on the nice hard deck face first, wind milled his arms and crashed.  Once aboard he flailed—no, that was definitely flopping—and gasped, coughed, spat up two great lungfuls of water (and probably his last meal). By that time a loose ring of seamen stood gawking at him. He waved an arm at them, maybe to ward them off or assure them he was fine, but then he tried to pick himself up off the deck and fell back into the puddle of his own sick/lung water.

Labari shook her head and started on the primaries of her other wing. She would never understand the mortal realm. Grooming, though, that was easy.  

 

“We do not panic and start breaking things!” the Winter Marauder scolded. He pinched Scarlett’s pointed ear with his remaining hand and would have done the same to Quicksilver if he weren’t so lacking in the hand department.

“Ow! Owowowowow!” she whined, awkwardly pulled along. The brig was a damn mess, freshly useless and the kind of workplace hazard a union would have kittens over. Did the Avenger have a union? Did Winter have to explain the witches’ actions to some dour-faced, lemon-lobbying, clipboard-owning union rep? Silver trailed behind them, trying to look contrite and not quite hitting the mark. These damn kids were nothing but trouble.

A pair of crewmen darted past, but paused at the Marauder’s sharp bark. “Where’re you two going in such a hurry, huh?”

“A commotion on deck, sir,” the younger of the two squeaked. His elder elbowed him but they both quailed under Winter’s glower. It was a good glower; it got answers. “Cap Rogers is back from the dead, apparently,” the young sailor added, holding a slim wooden crate tighter as if to provide a barrier between him and Winter’s menace.

“Shut up! We don’t hafta answer to the likes of him!” the other hissed.

“Rogers died? And he’s back?” He felt off kilter, as if he walked up a flight of steps in the dark and the topmost step were missing.

“He was thrown clear off the boat,” the young man gabbled. “Fell into the drink. I heard some talk of mermaids, witchery most foul, that sort of thing.”

“Well then get going,” the Winter Marauder growled. The seamen fled.

Scarlett squirmed out of his grip and rubbed at her abused ear. “Did you hear that? We are betrayed!” she cried. “They would give you an audience with a dead man! Liars and pirates all of them; to hell with this ship and everyone on it!”

“This is a stupid misunderstanding,” he answered, voice cold and soft enough the twins had to strain to hear. “Steve doesn’t die easy. He’s alive.”

“People don’t die and just come back!” she hissed. Her brother chewed a thumbnail, uneasy despite the expansive blank space in his memory. “Either he died and is still dead and this ruckus is for nothing, or he fell into the sea and your beloved Fury promised you a meeting he could not deliver.”

“We need to take the Tesseract and go—“ _home_ hung on the air, but Silver could not bring himself to utter it—“and go.”

Winter gritted his teeth. “We’re not going anywhere. Not until I get this sorted. You can either help or you can stand aside but do not try to hinder me.” Something dangerous brewed in his tone, thunder before the storm. He brushed by them and stomped up through the hatch into the blinding daylight above.

 _He knew me._ For a moment, just a moment, he paused at the outskirts of the huddled Avengers surrounding the source of the commotion. Perhaps they surrounded a body, one with yellow hair and the untroubled blue of sky behind its eyelids. He breathed. He forced his legs to carry him to the circle and stopped again. Perhaps, Captain Rogers lived—certainly he lived in Winter’s jigsaw memories, a figure larger than life and so alive with determination and righteousness—but perhaps the real thing did not. Human memory, so fragile, so flawed, could only recreate so much and his own memory could not be up to the task. Not yet.

And the real thing might look upon him as a stranger. It would be better to fade away, to return empty-handed to the Goblin King and be smeared away from reality. But he had to know.

He elbowed his way through the cluster of jostling sailors. At least he still had two elbows, and people did not care much for pointy metal appendages digging directly into their flanks. Steve, waxy pale and wide-eyed and soaked to the bone, lay half curled on the deck. He blinked blearily up at the Marauder, coughing weakly and looking like hell.

“Bucky,” he rasped between coughs. The name, a child’s nickname, rattled hollow in his skull, meaningless, but there was recognition there. There was surprise and, if her were of a fanciful nature, hope.

Winter dropped to his knees. “Oh gods, Stevie.” One-handed, he pushed off his sodden frockcoat. “You look like shit. What happened to you?”

“I joined the Avengers.”

Winter blinked away the memory of a younger man with a younger face in a smoky bar, with a gold ring wrapped in the kind of handkerchief people like them wouldn’t even think of holding in their grubby hands. Sensibility stole into the fore of his mind. There were too many open mouths and idle hands on this damn ship. “Give this man some space!” he barked. “You! I need some water and dry clothes. You! Yes, you! Fetch some hearty soup, something with dumplings in it.”

“We got lemons and hardtack and pickles,” the startled crewmen rebutted.

“Gimme some of that, I’ll figure something out. The rest of you, I’m pretty sure there’s a ship to run! Hop to ’t!”

“You’re a menace, Barnes,” Steve choked out, sounding for all the world like he was trying to figure out how lungs worked. The name rattled in Winter’s brain but didn’t stick; it was a sound that happened but didn’t stick in his memory, an utterance he couldn’t recreate if he tried.

“That’s First Mate Menace to you, ya punk” he countered, the words tripping off the tongue without his brain doing any work.

“Such a jerk,” Steve wheezed.

Winter shook his head with a dry chuckle. The stubbornness his memory got right, at least. His pocket watch ticked, a heavy round weight in his breast pocket that measured the seconds in rhythm with his heart. There was still time.

 

“The good news is we found Rogers,” Natasha reported.

Fury raised his face from his hands. He never had these problems when he was captaining the Shield or overseeing the Strategic Reserve as a favor to Her Ladyship. “And the bad news?”

“The brig might need some remodeling. Let’s see, ah, a silver lining is that Stark fainted and the infirmary temporarily misplaced the smelling salts so he shouldn’t get into any trouble for the next twenty minutes or so.”

“And the Winter Marauder?”

“He corralled the witch twins and has spent the last ten minutes scolding Captain Rogers for nearly dying.” She pursed her lips. For a reformed elf-human-thing she had a damn good poker face, but Fury spent his career deciphering all manner of poker faces.

“And?”

“Hmm?”

“What is it you’re not telling me, Romanoff?”

“Oh, there’s a couple mermaids loitering within spitting distance of the hull.”

Fury jumped to his feet and grabbed the pommel of his sword. “Good gods! Get someone on the cannons! What the hell!”

She waved him to silence. “It’s fine! It’s fine! Apparently they’re acquaintances of Captain Rogers. Mostly they seem to be yelling at the Winter Marauder’s pet bird and trying to splash it, with some mixed success.”

“I don’t want mermaids within a hundred clicks of my damn boat!”

“Then you better talk with Rogers, provided Winter quits sitting on him and trying to feed him broth.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Ask me the primary ingredient of Winter’s broth.”

“Oh gods.”

“It’s pickle juice. He keeps insisting on calling the hardtack dumplings. I don’t think the Marauder is all there, but it’s fun to watch.”

“Get the hell out of my cabin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My hobby: giving all your favorite characters TRAGIC BACKSTORIES. If anyone wants to write Magneto's story that takes place in the same pirate universe, put on your Nikes and just do it. I love the idea of Magneto floating around in this 'verse but I don't wanna write that.
> 
> The thing about smiling dogs I originally read from Stephen King's "Cujo," but it's a legit thing. If a dog is smiling and relaxed, you're all good. If a dog is smiling and tense, they are about to rip you a new one. Please be aware of animal body language when interacting with animals.
> 
> Thor's description of Loki from Odin's perspective, "...he could either rule over Asgard or curb my brother’s behavior; he could not possibly do both," comes from President T.R. Roosevelt's commentary on his daughter. Alice Roosevelt Longworth is one of those badass women in history I never heard about until I left school and you can find her wikipedia article [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Roosevelt_Longworth). 
> 
> One time I tried to write a cool origin story for a superhero oc, but the only name I could come up with was Scruffles, the Invincible. I'm not proud.
> 
> For those who were uncertain, Darcy is totally the one cussing out Labari and splashing at her. Jane is in the background, pretending very hard that she doesn't know her. Thor has his game face on


	6. Nothing But Death Do Us Part

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He snorted, and his hand wandered back to the necklace. “Lady Natasha, the shame I felt when I could not pick Mjolnir from the rock was more than I could stand. Do you believe me capable of cowardice?”

“What do you mean you died?!”

Bucky was mad, and Steve might have been mad right back if it weren’t for the fact that it was _Bucky,_ who was more dear to him than any other living creature. Steve remained somewhat unconvinced that he hadn’t died; everything seemed so surreal. _An hour ago I swam with mermaids unmolested_ , he thought. Well, as unmolested as one can be when Darcy swam within earshot. And now he lay on a cot—a real cot this time—across from the man he loved and lost and mourned.

“Loki stabbed me with poison and threw me into the ocean,” Steve replied. His throat hurt from coughing up brine and bile and his whole body ached. His limbs felt heavy, limp on the over-starched sheets and the skin under his ears itched like the devil. And Bucky was here. Alive. Whole. Well, whole after a fashion. Something happened to his arm, and something more recent happened to his metal hand. “I hit the water and everything went black. Don’t look at me like that! I got better!”

Bucky glowered. “Yeah, like you always do, ya goddam punk.”

“Fight me,” Steve hummed, letting his eyes shut. Bucky sat across from him, booted feet a solid weight depressing a corner of the cot, a changed man. There was the metal arm and the longish hair, but also new lines around his eyes, too long and deep for a man his age, as if he led an especially hard life in the years since he…since he…

But in most ways he was the same. Missing a few marbles and a limb, yes, but the patter of his anger ran the same as always. Right now he snapped and glowered, all a familiar outrage. He was mad alright, but not truly pissed. When most people get really angry, they might get red in the face, shout a bit, hold a grudge for some time and, eventually, forget all about it. When Bucky got angry, really angry, he skipped most of the steps of normal anger and went straight into evil bastard mode. When Bucky got really angry, the poor fool/cause of his anger would be the last to know.

Steve dropped an arm over his eyes, mouth tugging into a reluctant smile. “Do you remember that one guy that worked on the docks? I think his name was Murphy? Or Billy.”

Bucky squinted at him. “Sounds familiar.”

“You got him and his best friend fired a week before Christmas.”

“Shit. Why’d I do that?”

“Billy (or whatever) shushed you in a meeting.”

“That asshole shushed me!” Bucky squawked with sudden recollection and rancor. “I couldn’t believe it! In front of the gods and everyone, he up and shushes me like I didn’t even matter!” A wadded up pair of socks sailed through the air and caught the side of Bucky’s head. “Hey!”

“Hey yourself!” the crewmen across the infirmary barked. “Some of us are trying to recover from a moderate concussion.” He winced. “Everything is too loud. And bright.”

“Hodges,” Steve blurted out.

“ _That’s_ what his name was!” Bucky cried, and only narrowly avoided the boot thrown at his head.

The creak of floorboards alerted them to Bruce Banner’s arrival, followed closely by Nick Fury. “Can’t I at least look in on my patients before you demand a debrief?” the good doctor was saying.

Fury snorted, “I don’t see why we can’t do both.”

Steve watched Bruce visibly swallow his rebuttal. “As you like,” he said around the squirmy discomfort. Things were going too _fast_.

Steve hummed again. “We need to talk to Thor for a half decent debrief, and we’re going to need blood.”

Bucky winced. “Like a human sacrifice?”

“Gross,” the other patient complained from his nest of stiff blankets.

“More like a summoning. Thor knows more about the, the Goblin King, than I do.”

 

“I need to go. Your realm needs me.”

Jane pressed her palms to his cheeks, let her fingers sink into his long, barely manageable hair. “Your realm, too,” she reminded him. Her voice was gentle, her big brown eyes sad.

Thor drew breath, perhaps to tell a joke. Something about living wakes, something about no time for them now. Time. There was never enough of it when you needed it most. He did not tell her a joke. Boisterous Thor, overwhelming Thor, so quick with a quip and smile because the man behind the mask hated worrying everyone. For so long, time stretched thin for him, so that minutes passed like hours, the span between one sunrise and the next an infinite lifespan. And then Jane, with her crèche of friends and her bright eyes and her love for the storm’s rage. Darcy might have given Thor the mermaid’s kiss, but Jane breathed life into him again, a little to a time. One day, he hoped to take Jane on land, just for a night. And he would show her what a storm looked like above the water, and the stars afterward. She would get a real kick out of the night sky. And now he might not get the chance, time was so _short_.

But in this time, in this place, he had nothing to give her, no palliative words, no balm. Somewhere along the way he became her family, and now he would break it up. “Jane,” he murmured. There were no other words. There were no apologies great enough for this transgression. How many families must he lose before death takes him permanently? “Our realm needs me,” he said, because it needed saying. “And Asgard too.”

“You don’t owe Asgard anything.”

“I know I don’t,” he soothed. “That’s why I have to go.”

“But you’ll come back. Tell me you’ll come back.”

“I love you.” He gently pulled her hands to his lips, kissed her palms.

“Promise me you’ll come back!” she snapped. And that was Jane—so lovely as to look delicate, but her anger was as real as her wrath. He would miss her rage as much as her laughter. He should promise to come back to her, promise to stay alive, promise to keep her close and show her the stars. Promises, promises.

“I love you,” he said again, because it needed saying. Were he still a prince of Asgard and a child besides, he might have made sweeping promises, grand oaths, empty assurances all. He was grown now, not exactly as grown as he could be, but more a man by any measure than he was even a handful of years ago. So he kissed his Jane and let the current sweep him to the ship, to the source of the Call, and he wouldn’t let himself look back to see Jane’s distress. Or to let her see his own.

 

Thor landed on the deck with considerably more grace than Steve did. There was also a great deal of coughing and retching; before the crew’s very eyes his fins and scales dissolved into wisps of sea foam, his tail bisected into a pair of long legs and finally Thor sprawled on the floorboards, naked and wet and sucking in great lungfuls of cool night air.

“Gross,” Clint grunted, his own personal mantra lately. He leaned against the railing, head pounding but hands steady enough. Banner told him not to exert himself—too much activity could land him back in the infirmary if he was lucky, a body bag if he wasn’t. The fresh air did him a world of good, though. He could do without naked men flopping around on his ship, but beggars can’t be choosers.

 

A single lantern hung from an unbroken beam on the ceiling cast dull yellow light and sharp shadows across the captain’s office-turned-briefing room. It swayed from its mooring with the gentle rocking of the ship. A quick survey of the Avenger’s crew turned up a suitable tunic, leggings and jacket for Thor, who still managed to look like a storybook prince where he sat on Fury’s left at the scarred desk. Steve and Winter sat across from them, with Natasha and the twins standing in the available spaces between.

“We will need better weapons and a great deal of cunning to subdue the villainous Goblin King,” Thor explained.

“That’s not in question,” Fury replied, his stiffly polite tone still acerbic. “But this guy is one bad motherfucker. I don’t know if we have the guns or the manpower to take him down.”

“What we need is a plan of attack and an inventory,” Steve soothed.

“Inventory-wise, we have jack squat,” Natasha grumbled.

“Plan of attack? Attack,” Tony said, leaning on the empty window sill.

“Get the hell outta my office!”

“Technically I’m not in your office, Nick. See? I’m outside your office.” Tony leaned over the sill. “Now I’m in your office. Inside,” he leaned back, “outside.”

Winter glowered at him. “Shouldn’t you be working on a better replacement for my hand? I thought you were a genius.”

Tony jabbed an accusatory finger in his direction. “That hurts, Mister Cold. It’s comments like that that really hurt my self-esteem. You have a state-of-the-art refurbished digital prosthetic along a unilateral curve, with parts taken from a reclaimed household jacket holder-upper.”

“I helped!” Silver added, chest filling with pride.

Winter gaped. “You put a clothes hanger on my wrist! I have a hook for a hand!”

Natasha nodded somberly. “And you could put an eye out with that thing. Put that on the inventory as a deadly weapon.”

“Do not—Steve don’t write that down. Stop.”

Fury groaned into his hands. “Back to the matter at hand! How are we going to whack the Goblin King?”

Winter drummed the fingers of his remaining hand on the desk. “On one hand, we need to take the fight to the Fairy Realm or we’ll never be able to get close enough to the King to make a difference.”

“On the other hand,” Scarlett went on, glaring Tony’s suggestive grin into submission, “we’ll be fighting him on his own turf.”

“In a place without time,” Natasha murmured darkly.

Silver squinted at the clumsy scrawl that passed for Steve’s penmanship. “What is a Dire Deafener?”

The lantern overhead swung slowly.

 

“When last I saw it, I could not lift it from the stone.”

Thor, Steve, Bucky, the twins, Tony, Natasha and Bruce stood at the lip of the crater in the middle of the desert and looked down on the hammer. It was a mean-looking weapon with a big, blocky head and a short handle, lodged into a bit of sandstone that had partially melted upon impact and then cooled. Even from this far back Steve could feel the magic radiating from it in the form of tingles creeping along the planes of his face and down his arms, making his hair stand on end.

Then Bucky gave Steve a shove and the captain traipsed down into the crash site. “Go on, then!” Thor encouraged. Steve steeled himself, grasped the hammer by the handle, and pulled. He pulled a little harder. It did not budge. He grit his teeth, planted his feet firmly, and heaved.

“I wanna try!” 

Steve wiped his hands on his slacks and stepped away so Tony could try. “This should be good,” Bucky muttered. Tony spat on his palms, rubbed them together, grasped the hammer’s haft and pulled.

“Lift with your legs,” Steve offered.

Tony scowled and grunted “I’m lifting with my everything, Spangles.”

Bucky and the twins half slid, half trudged down to the hammer. “Don’t hurt yourself, Shortie,” Bucky growled.

Tony unleashed a barely human war cry and gave one last good pull before ceding the well-stuck hammer to Bucky and his mechanical arm.

They all took a turn except Thor and Natasha, who both sat at the edge of the crater and watched the proceedings with mottled concern and mirth. “What gives!?” Silver whined, kicking at the sandstone holding the hammer in place.

“None of you are worthy!” Thor replied.

Steve sighed to himself and pushed his hands in his pockets. Scarlett prowled around the crash site, pensive. “Maybe it can be magicked free?”

“I don’t suggest it!” Thor barked, but too late. Red magic glared along her fingertips and circled the fallen weapon. Between one blink and the next Steve went from standing a few feet from the hammer to standing nearly a quarter mile away from a significantly deeper crater. Silver panted and heaved and dropped his sister in the sand—the last one that needed rescuing. She blinked at Tony and Bucky and Natasha, all safely carried by her brother away from the curling red smoke at the center of the crash site.

“Oops.”

Silver shook a finger at her, his other hand clutching the stitch in his side. “We. Will fight about. This. Later!”

Natasha blew a strand of red hair out of her face. “Thor, it seems to me you’re probably the only one who could wield the hammer, let alone lift it.”

He gave her a rueful shrug. “When last I travelled to this place, I could not budge Mjolnir. I was not worthy.”

“And when was this? Five years ago? More?” she challenged.

He dropped his eyes to the sandy ground. “I have learned much in these past few years, and grown more than I ever imagined.”

Bucky pinched the bridge of his nose. “Then go get Myeu-myuh! We have a world to save!”

“Ah.” But Thor made no move to approach the charred crater. Bucky drew breath to ask him what his problem was but Thor beat him to the punch. “I have grown, but at my core I will always be selfish, I suspect.”

He blinked. “I don’t know what to do with that,” Bucky admitted.

“Boys, go back to the boat,” Natasha ordered, and shooed them all away. Thor watched them go and sat down on the dune once again, crossing his legs, eyes distant. She turned back to face him and crossed her arms because this was Serious Business. “Okay, what was that all about?”

He gestured toward the embedded hammer. “One of my father’s greatest treasures. He banished it along with me when I committed an unforgiveable folly, in the hopes that when I learned my lesson I would once again be able to wield it and…go home.”

“So, what, you pick up the hammer and it carries you back to Asgard?”

“Essentially.”

“But don’t you want to go home?”

He touched the necklace at his throat, fingertips lingering along a yellowed fang. “I do. But that is not where Mjolnir would take me.” He dropped his hand back to his knee. “I was banished from my birthplace against my will, forced to live amongst mortals far away from everything and everyone I knew and loved. The despair, the anomie, the terrible isolation were too much for me to bear.”

“I can imagine.”

He snorted, and his hand wandered back to the necklace. “Lady Natasha, the shame I felt when I could not pick Mjolnir from the rock was more than I could stand. Do you believe me capable of cowardice?”

“If I have learned anything from being human, it’s that anyone is capable of anything.”

“I was overcome. I travelled to the sea and pitched myself from a precipice there into the unforgiving, icy depths during a tumultuous thunder storm. I do not know if I believe in the fates, or in gods, but none other than my Jane found me before I could drown. For all her knowledge of medicine and science, she could not heal my tortured soul but she was kind in a way I had never known. And after some time I learned to hunt at her side and she taught me the songs of her people even if I could not sing them so eloquently, and day by day I was able to heal myself. I do not know if this was meant to be a second chance. I do not believe I deserved one. But I believe in Jane, and I believe in little kindnesses, and I must believe that that is enough.”

Natasha watched the last few tendrils of smoke from the crater dissolve on the wind. “You don’t have to make any big decisions right now. We can try again tomorrow.”

“The decision is made,” he murmured. “What is the cowardice of one man to the fate of his adoptive realm? Tomorrow I will take up the hammer if it will have me and we will go to war. But until then let us drink our woes away for just one night!” He laughed and it was only a little forced as he got to his feet and offered a hand to Natasha.

She smirked and waved him off. “Go on without me. I want to sit for a little while.”

“As you like it,” he said. He bowed at her with a flourish and bounded back to the boat.

Natasha watched him go and waited until he was out of sight before standing back up. Her hands itched.

The hammer was kind of a dumb idea; there was no guarantee any of them could lift or wield it. She hardly pinned all her hope on such a flimsy thing. And she certainly wasn’t going to try her luck with all the boys looking at her. As far as they knew, she was above it all—impeccably competent, wise, lovely. Such is the way of humans, she had learned early on. As a woman, she needed to be commanding without being shrill, brilliant without gloating, capable but nice, desirable but unattainable. It was a fine line to walk and she did it better than anyone she knew. So she refrained from touching the hammer: should she lift it she might upset the crew’s dynamic and spread jealousy among their ranks, but if she failed to lift it she would appear inadequate, _unworthy_. 

But no one was looking now. She padded down into the hole and confronted the lodged hammer. “I thought you would be bigger,” she muttered. She took hold of the handle, testing the leather grip. What kind of weapon was a hammer, anyway? Give her a sword, or a gun, or a dagger. Even her fists were deadly weapons if the mood should take her. Then again, crushing a skull under a hammer would be more satisfying than crushing a skull under her knuckles…

Uru parted from sandstone easily enough and she lifted the hammer, lifted Mjolnir, from the ground’s hold. She frowned at the blocky head. “You smug fuck.”

 

When Steve travelled to the High Temple, he encountered a sword lodged in a stone. Local lore claimed that only the pure of heart could pull it free and so it had waited in the stone for many years until an intrepid traveler stumbled upon it in his time of need. Some bards claimed that Steve fought off a horde of bandits with the sword, but he was actually walking through the forest at dusk, tripped over a root, and grabbed the sword on his way down. Both he and the sword hit the ground. Annoyed that he scraped up his hands, he took the sword and wrapped it in leather, thinking he might at least sell the stupid thing for his trouble. Of course, no one would take it off his hands. It was a magic sword. With a magic wielder (himself). Only a fool would invite such a thing into their life.

Everything about the sword was magic. In the light of day, no one could mistake it for anything but magic. The blade gleamed blue in the presence of dragons, and gave off an eerie silver light the rest of the time. The pommel had jewels in it. Real jewels that even the lowliest merchant would not dare fence. The edge was always sharp, no matter how often Steve used it to chop wood. It would not rust if submerged in water. Runes from a long dead language had been carefully etched into the handle; they turned gold when squinted at for any length of time. It even had a name, which it whispered through the corridors of Steve’s darkest dreams: Dire Defender, the ender of battles, harbinger of peace. Of course, it wasn’t the kind of peace Steve liked to think about. Dire Defender longed for the same kind of peace found in forgotten cemeteries.

Overall, he much preferred his ordinary, nameless cutlass. It never glowed, and it refrained from lurking in his dreams, and it had absolutely no jewels or runes on it at all. It would rust given half the chance, and it needed to be sharpened regularly, and it was just a sword.

Still, he stored Dire Defender in with his things and travelled with it wherever he went. He tried “forgetting” it a few times, but no matter how far he ran or how well he hid, the magic sword made its way back to him. Packing it amidst his spare shirts and slacks saved time.

“I really hate your sword.” Bucky shuddered and slammed the trunk shut.

“You and me both.”

**Author's Note:**

> Look at the lovely artwork that inspired this fic!  
> 
> 
>  


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